


A Stitch in Time

by groveofbones



Category: Dredd (2012)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Experimentation, Organ Theft, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-10-11
Packaged: 2019-06-24 16:22:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15634341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: Dredd and Anderson take on the task of mopping up Ma-Ma's operation and trying to root out any other corrupt Judges. In the process, they discover Ma-Ma's connections to an underground organ harvesting and replacement operation. They can think of someone from the Ma-Ma Clan who might know something about that.





	1. Chapter 1

“Passed?” Anderson asked, completely bewildered. 

 

The Chief Judge nodded. “Judge Dredd told me as soon as he left Peach Trees this morning. He didn’t tell you?”

 

“Um… no,” Anderson said, trying to smooth out her facial expression and make herself look less shocked. “I guess he… neglected to, in all the chaos. But I’m glad to hear that I passed.”

 

The Chief Judge looked at her appraisingly. “Do you know of any reason why you shouldn’t have passed?”

 

“No, ma’am,” Anderson said quickly. 

 

She had gone back to the Hall of Justice to see the Judges’ in-house doctor, assuming that, if she was going to be stripped of the career she’d worked all her life for, she might as well get one last good medical appointment out of it. Dr. Akinyemi had taken X-rays and scans, checked her for a concussion, determined that there were no injuries that couldn’t be fixed by a day or two of rest, asked her if she wanted a referral to a post-trauma specialist, frowned when Anderson said no, and sent her the contact information anyway. 

 

By that time, she had been summoned to see the Chief Judge. She’d gone, her stomach churning. Part of her was devastated that she would never be a Judge now, part of her was furious that the Judges would cast her out after everything she’d been through, everything she’d done, at Peach Trees. 

 

But through it all, she had been certain that she would be informed that she’d failed the examination and asked to turn in her uniform and never return. She had lost her personal weapon, allowed herself to be taken prisoner. There was no way she could have passed, Judge Dredd had made that clear. 

 

And yet… here she was.

 

“If… If that’s all, ma’am? I should probably get to my patrol,” she stuttered out, trying to reconcile her expectations with reality. 

 

“Actually, Judge Anderson,” the Chief Judge said, and hearing those words sent a thrill through her, even with the conflicted emotions that her night in Peach Trees had given her. “Judge Dredd has proposed a special assignment and been granted the time and resources to pursue it. He specially requested your assistance on the assignment.”

 

“What assignment?”

 

“That’s only going to be told to essential personnel. You don’t have to take this assignment, Judge Dredd asked that the choice be left up to you. If you’d prefer, you can be sent out on regular patrol. But Dredd did say that he thought your help would be very valuable.”

 

Anderson actually took a moment to consider it. She wasn’t sure what she thought of Dredd; there were times, that night, that he’d seemed completely inhuman. But this was her dream: to be a Judge, to help her city and the people in it, and Dredd was the best at what they did. They’d gone to Peach Trees to investigate a murder and ended up bringing down a powerful and violent gang that had taken over the entire tower block. There had been a terrible amount of collateral damage, and she wasn’t entirely convinced that all their actions in Peach Trees had been the correct ones, but…

 

But there was never really any doubt about what she’d say. 

 

“I accept the assignment,” Anderson said. 

 

“Good.” The Chief Judge nodded. “Judge Dredd’s office is on the seventy-second floor. I’ll let him know you’re coming.”

 

Anderson saluted and left the room. 

 

On the elevator ride to the seventy-second floor, she tried to calm her confusion. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and evenly. _Blank and open to knowledge_ , she recited to herself. _Gather all the information before you draw your conclusions_. 

 

Between the fiftieth and fifty-first floors, the transmitter she’d taken out of her helmet and fitted into an earpiece crackled. 

 

“Judge Anderson. This is Dredd. Meet me at room 8-641B on the ninetieth floor.”

 

“Understood, Judge Dredd,” Anderson replied. Judge Dredd didn’t say anything more. Anderson hit the button to reroute the elevator and frowned. 

 

She had never been on the ninetieth floor before. The higher floors, up to the eighty-fifth floor, were reserved for the offices of senior Judges, but above that… No one was quite sure, at least none of the cadets and rookies. The rumor was that the most secret and important files and records were kept there, but no one was allowed up there unless they had an explicit assignment. 

 

Which, now, Anderson had. 

 

Judge Dredd was waiting for her outside room 8-641B. He had his helmet on, what she could see of his face impassive but for the scowl that was so ever-present that he was probably born with it. She had the brief, crazy thought that she should try to sneak into his mind, just to try to catch a glimpse of what he was thinking, why he’d passed her when she should have failed, why he’d selected her for this assignment.

 

She knew better, though. People could always tell something was wrong when she was in their heads, something just a bit off, and he would know immediately what she was doing. 

 

“Judge,” he said stonily, by way of greeting.

 

“Judge,” she answered, barely keeping herself from saluting. She wasn’t a rookie anymore. 

 

Judge Dredd didn’t say anything else, just pressed his palm against a pad on the door. A green light blinked and the door swung open. 

 

Inside was a room with two desks, two chairs, one computer terminal, and so many piles of white Hall of Justice evidence boxes that she could hardly see a path to the far wall.

 

“Our assignment,” Dredd said flatly. 

 

“What is this?” Anderson asked.

 

“Everything we could get from Ma-Ma’s servers in Peach Trees, from her living quarters, and from the offices of the four Judges that she bought. The four that we know about.”

 

Anderson shot a look at him. “You think there may be more?”

 

Dredd didn’t say anything for a long moment, his jaw clenching and unclenching. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he finally growled.

 

“The reason for the secrecy,” Anderson said.

 

Dredd nodded. “The case is closed. On the record.”

 

Anderson nodded, looking at the sea of evidence boxes. There would be a lot of information to go through. It would take sharp eyes and sharp minds. And at the end of the day, she was still a junior Judge.

 

“Why me, Judge?” she asked. “Why ask me to be a part of this assignment?”

 

He strode past her into the room. “Let’s get to work,” he said.

 

***

 

Ma-Ma had had the drops that kept his eyes conditioned. He hadn’t had time to look for them. 

 

His eyes were starting to swell shut. He’d known that was going to happen. He couldn’t turn them without stabbing pain, so he had to turn his whole head to look at anything. The mechanics were starting to fail, everything was blurry. Soon enough, he wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. 

 

Ma-Ma had kept him fed, given him a place to sleep, kept his eyes working. She had hurt him and hurt him and hurt him, but she’d also kept him alive. Ma-Ma was gone, he’d heard that much from the crowds around Peach Trees, the one time he’d dared to get close again. Ma-Ma was gone, and her old haunts were crawling with Judges. He didn’t know what was going to happen to him. No, that was a lie, of course he knew what was going to happen to him. He just didn’t know when or how. 

 

He tried to find places to hide. He was so cold, he was so hungry. If anyone caught sight of him, they’d hurt him. He couldn’t see well enough to protect himself. He wanted his eyes back so much. 

 

He had the thought in the middle of his second night on the streets, curled up between a dumpster and a wall, trying to make himself as small as his long, lanky body would allow, arms pressed against his stomach as if that would stop it aching. The pupils of his eyes no longer got wide enough to allow him to see in the dark, and he was afraid that the blindness would continue into the day this time, and then it would truly be over.

 

He had the thought, then, that he could go back to the Stitch Maker. He thought he could find the Stitch Maker’s place, and he could ask for help, ask for his eyes to be fixed, he could offer anything…

 

No, no, that was a bad idea, a terrible idea. Better dead than the Stitch Maker. Ma-Ma had hurt him, but she’d at least kept him alive, too. All the Stitch Maker had given him was pain. 

 

He could hear voices from the street, loud voices, people shouting, maybe happy, maybe angry. Either way, if they caught him, they’d probably hurt him. He couldn’t defend himself. He hunched down further, putting his forehead against his knees. His eyes couldn’t make tears, and he was already shaking from the cold, so it was like he wasn’t even crying. 

 

***

 

Ma-Ma, as it turned out, had kept impeccable, hand-written records in antiquated ledgers. Unfortunately, she also kept them in some kind of code. There were symbols to represent each of her contacts and symbols to represent each item that she delivered to or received from them, so that the only things that were immediately decipherable were the numbers. 

 

Dredd had taken upon himself the task of trying to find a way into the encrypted files that they’d gotten from Ma-Ma’s servers. They both knew it would probably end up needing an expert, but Dredd wanted to exhaust all of their abilities before letting someone else into their confidence. They also hadn’t found Ma-Ma’s computer technician yet; they didn’t want to put out an alert on him as a person of interest, in case there were any corrupt Judges that didn’t realize that he had survived, so the best they could do was get CCTV footage of people matching his description sent to them personally. 

 

It was a lot to go through. Anderson was already feeling overwhelmed, and she hoped Dredd wasn’t thinking too hard about the fact that it had been her decision not to keep the technician in custody. It wasn’t too late for Dredd to revoke the passed exam he had given her, at least she didn’t think it was. 

 

In any case, Dredd had given Anderson the task of going through the ledgers and keeping a tally of how often each individual symbol repeated. She was good at recognizing patterns, it was a necessity if she was going to decipher the chaos of another person’s mind, but that didn’t make the task any less tedious. They’d been at it for nearly 48 hours, taking only short breaks for food and the bare minimum of sleep. Anderson hadn’t been back to her apartment since she’d reported to the Hall of Justice expecting to have to give up her uniform. 

 

She stood from the desk she’d spread with ledgers and notebooks, stretching and rubbing her eyes. She debated trying to sleep, but she didn’t want to be away from her work any more than she had to be. If there were still corrupt Judges, they had to find them sooner rather than later. Maybe if she just walked around a little, she’d be able to focus again. 

 

She wandered the room, trying to stay out of Dredd’s line of sight and avoid disturbing him. She had the feeling he knew exactly where she was and what she was doing anyway. 

 

She found herself standing in front of a metal evidence box full of the contents of a safe that Ma-Ma had had in her living space. All of the items had been examined for explosives or biological weapons and cleared. Most of it was bottles of slo-mo at various levels of fullness, along with a few inhalers. But there were also a few strange pieces of what looked like medical equipment, scanners, packaged hypodermic syringes, even a few sealable boxes that Dr. Akinyemi had said could be used to transport organs. 

 

Anderson listlessly sorted through it, wincing at the thought of what Ma-Ma might have been doing with preserved organs and who she might have gotten them from. In one corner of the box was a small bottle about three-quarters full of some clear, viscous liquid. It fit neatly into the palm of her hand, and as she tilted it, she saw a tiny paper label stuck to the bottom of the bottle. She flipped it over and her eyes widened. 

 

The label contained a capital A and a symbol that looked as if someone had drawn an O with a line along the bottom, then erased a gap into the middle of the line. She recognized the symbol because she’d been seeing it over and over for hours. 

 

She took the bottle with her as she returned to her table and picked up the tablet on which she’d been taking notes.

 

She scrolled back through her notes, looking for all the places she’d noted the symbol appearing. She studied what she’d come up with for a moment, making sure she was confident in her theory, then cleared her throat. 

 

“Sir, um, Judge Dredd,” she said. He glanced at her, not saying anything. He still hadn’t removed his helmet, and she’d started to think of the blank glass as his real face. 

 

She handed him her tablet. “Did we get a chemical analysis of whatever’s in this bottle?”

 

Dredd nodded. “It’s a homemade version of the formulas to keep bodies from rejecting prosthetics or organ transplants.” He picked up his own tablet and frowned as he looked for Dr. Akinyemi’s report. “Agents to prevent infection, special nontoxic lubricants used to keep biological and mechanical parts from damaging each other. Why?”

 

“There’s a symbol on the bottle, it shows up over and over in the ledgers.” 

 

She handed Dredd the bottle, and he looked at the label. “It’s Greek letters. Alpha and omega.”

 

“Here, look,” she tapped a few keys to send her notes to his tablet. “It looks like Ma-Ma was transporting things both to and from whoever or whatever this symbol represents. When things come in from this symbol, there’s a bunch of activity. Every time a shipment comes in from this symbol, almost immediately afterward, there are smaller deliveries to several of Ma-Ma’s clan members.”

 

“Slo-mo,” Dredd said, quickly. Anderson was gratified that he’d come to the same conclusion. “This symbol represents their supplier of the raw materials. They get a shipment in, make a batch, and send out a supply to the dealers.”

 

Anderson nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

 

“So what was going the other way? Money?”

 

Anderson shook her head. “No, the money was kept track of in a different ledger. I checked it against the log of slo-mo supplies, and Ma-Ma paid for each delivery, but she was also receiving payments for whatever she was sending the other way.”

 

“Do you have any ideas?” Dredd asked.

 

Anderson nodded again. “Each shipment to this symbol is accompanied by four numbers. One is the amount of the item, but I couldn’t figure out the other three. But I noticed that the numbers 7.7.5 appear a lot.”

 

Dredd’s face didn’t show any expression, but he cocked his head to the side, waiting for her to explain. She gestured to the organ transplant cases, each of which was 7 inches by 7 inches by 5 inches. He nodded when he got it, and she could have sworn the corner of his mouth twitched. 

 

“Any other repeating numbers?” he asked. 

 

“84.28.23,” she said, grimly. 

 

“A good size box to hold a body,” he said.

 

Anderson took a breath and steeled herself to ask a question that she thought might be completely stupid, but was about the only thing she could think about. “Do you think… Is slo-mo made out of human remains?”

 

Dredd huffed a short breath, and Anderson realized that he was laughing at her. “Doubt it,” he said flatly. Anderson could feel herself blushing. “Not the worst conclusion to come to,” Dredd said, and cleared his throat. “It’s a chop shop.” At her blank look, he clarified, “Organ harvesting. Biological and mechanical transplants.” He gestured to the bottle still resting on Anderson’s table. “Most chop shops have connections to get hold of medical equipment and chemicals.”

 

“A lot of the ingredients in slo-mo are in use in hospitals,” Anderson said, remembering the composition reports she’d seen. “So this chop shop must have decided to make some extra money by selling Ma-Ma her raw materials.”

 

Dredd gave a sharp nod. “It’s a good place to start. If Ma-Ma had a business relationship with a chop shop, I think we’ve already met someone who might know something about it.”

 

Anderson sighed. He was right, of course. Part of her wished he wasn’t, because she thought the poor man she’d met in Ma-Ma’s server room had been through enough, and a more selfish part of her wanted to somehow keep Dredd’s attention away from her unacceptable breach of Judgment protocol. But they needed the information. “We have to find the computer technician,” she said. “As soon as possible.”

 

***

 

It had rained during the night. He had wedged himself tightly into the shelter of the dumpster, trying to keep from getting wet, and had fallen asleep to the sound, the patter. It reminded him of the whirr of the servers. 

 

When he woke up, though, he was desperately, painfully thirsty. It was stupid to leave his hiding place, he knew; he should just stay put, maybe try to get some of the condensation off the wall behind him. But he heard a splash and realized that the rain had pooled somewhere, probably in a divot in the pavement, and he couldn’t resist. His throat ached and his head was spinning. 

 

He crawled out from shelter cautiously. His vision had deteriorated so much that everything around him was just a series of blurry, grayscale shapes, and the early morning sunlight seemed to stab all the way through his head. He pushed himself woozily to his feet and stumbled in the direction that he’d heard the splash. 

 

The mouth of the alleyway loomed like a fuzzy gap in the world in front of him, and he dropped to his knees and felt around until his hand touched water.

 

The water tasted oily and metallic, but it was such a relief, and he was so focused on getting as much of it into his mouth as possible, that he didn’t notice the fact that some of the footsteps on the street beyond were coming his way until it was too late. He tried to get himself back to his feet, but someone grabbed his arm. A large, blurry person-shape was looming over him, and five more were converging on the alley. 

 

He made an effort to pull his arm away, but the grip only tightened painfully. His heart pounded against his ribs; he knew what came next. This was going to be very unpleasant. 

 

“Think this is the one we were supposed to find,” one of the figures said. “What the hell is wrong with this thing?” 

 

“No idea,” the figure holding onto him said. “Looks pretty pathetic, whatever it is.” A couple of the other figures laughed, and he heard a sound he recognized, the _snikt_ of a knife being opened. He tried to pull free again, but the person who was holding onto him just threw him to the ground hard enough to stun him. A booted foot came down on his chest and pushed hard enough that his ribs creaked and he couldn’t draw a full breath. 

 

“Wait,” someone else said. The rush of relief went cold almost immediately when the same voice continued, “See that mark on his head?”

 

“Yeah, I see it. What is it?”

 

“The Stitch Maker puts that mark on his blanks. He doesn’t like his things just wandering around, though.” The figure bent to look in his face. “So who were you supposed to belong to?”

 

He couldn’t answer. He could only whimper in fear. His throat felt like it was closing up.

 

“Well, whatever. The Stitch Maker would pay us for returning the thing. Let’s get him up and out of here.”

 

Hands grabbed him and lifted him roughly back to his feet. His head was swimming by this point. He thought about crying out for help, but who would answer? Anyone hearing him would just want to hurt him, too, and at least the Stitch Maker would probably fix his eyes. 

 

_This is the best you can hope for_ , he thought, resigned, as he was pulled toward the mouth of the alley. 

 

Suddenly, a growling voice boomed from beyond his limited vision, “Stop. You are currently interfering with the administration of the Law. Get on the ground and put your hands where we can see them.”

 

And then all hell broke loose.

 

***

 

Anderson had been the one to find the technician. They had redirected their resources, by which Dredd meant their own attention spans, since they didn’t have anyone working for them, to reviewing the flags sent up by their automated security footage review. They had input a basic description of the man, but unfortunately, in a city of billions, there were a lot of tall, skinny male-bodied people, even with the man’s distinctive coloring. 

 

So now, instead of painstakingly studying Ma-Ma’s ledgers, Anderson was painstakingly studying frames of security footage. A redirection of resources, indeed. For all that he was a man of few words, Dredd was really good at using the bureaucratic euphemism-speak of the upper levels of Judges.

 

The two Judges had taken different approaches. Dredd’s working theory was that the technician would have tried to go to ground as far from Peach Trees as possible. In his long years as a Judge, he’d found that, for a lot of criminals, the instinctive response was to treat distance from the crime scene as safety from the Law. 

 

Anderson had a different theory. She had only been in the man’s mind for a few seconds, and she had been devoting her energies to looking for one thing in particular, but she had seen enough to have a bit of understanding of the man’s twisted relationship with Ma-Ma. His fear of her, even occasional hatred for her, had been balanced by a despairing certainty that she was all he had, that he would never be better off than he was under her authority. 

 

So while Dredd set up his search in an expanding ring moving outward from Peach Trees, Anderson focused her attention on a careful search of the closest blocks around the Peach Trees. When she had suggested it to Dredd, he’d frowned but, to her surprise, allowed her to follow her own judgment. 

 

It had taken her four hours of examination, but she’d finally caught sight of someone she’d thought might be him. Just before dawn on the day they’d emerged from Peach Trees, he’d appeared a block away from the building. She hadn’t seen anyone leave the building, and Judges had been guarding every known entrance and exit, but the Ma-Ma Clan had had firm control of the tower block. It made sense that they would have some secret ways in and out. 

 

She followed her candidate from camera to camera as he dodged from shadow to shadow, carefully avoiding looking at anyone, until, three blocks west of Peach Trees, he ducked into a narrow alleyway off a side street and didn’t emerge again. She ran on fast forward through the camera feeds of every view of the alley mouth and of the roofs of the nearby buildings, but saw no sign of him. Unless he knew another way out of that alley, the only conclusion that she could draw was that all that day, all that night, the next day, and the next night, through heat and rain, he had stayed put and made no attempt to find somewhere safe to stay. 

 

It was completely nonsensical behavior, unless it was the behavior of a man who was so completely broken by mistreatment that he couldn’t imagine a safe place away from his captor. If this was the right man, then he was hiding by instinct, not planning for the future.

 

She showed the footage to Dredd, and he examined it for a matter of seconds before nodding. “Plausible,” he said. “Let’s go, Judge.”

 

She reflected, a little dazedly, that he hadn’t felt the need to check what she’d found more carefully. He was working off her theory without complaint. She had no idea what was happening, given that she’d expected to be summarily booted from the Hall of Justice just a few days earlier. 

 

It didn’t take long to get back to Peach Trees. Dredd pulled his bike up to the building, and she followed. They parked the bikes in front of the living block, still broken open in places, and ignored the weary stares of the residents. They went the rest of the way on foot. 

 

“Disguising our destination?” Anderson asked under her breath as they walked a roundabout, side street route. 

 

“Bikes are conspicuous,” Dredd said simply. As they rounded the corner and the mouth of the alley came into view, Dredd’s hand shot out and landed on her shoulder. 

 

She ducked back out of sight and muttered, “I see it.” Four men and two women, all dressed in heavy clothes that could easily conceal weapons or possibly black-market body armor, had sauntered into the alley as if they owned it. 

 

A moment later, she heard a scuffle, a voice raised in high-pitched, wordless fear. She looked over at Dredd and saw that he, like her, was already reaching for his weapon. 

 

“Glad you decided on the helmet today,” he said dryly.

 

“Do we want them for questioning?” Anderson asked, setting her gun to stun bullets without waiting for his response.

 

He nodded sharply and darted out from cover toward the mouth of the alley. She followed him, drawing her gun. 

 

She leaned up against the wall of one of the buildings fronting the street as Dredd stepped into the alley and announced, “Stop. You are currently interfering with the administration of the Law. Get on the ground and put your hands where we can see them.” The helmet was irritatingly constricting, but she was still able to throw her mind outward and get a fix on the positions of the bodies in the alley. 

 

“Fuck! Judge!” someone shouted, and her careful map of the alley exploded into motion.

 

“Weapons!” Dredd said and got down on one knee, hunched into a smaller target with his gun securely aimed, tilting his head forward so the unprotected parts of his head were more difficult to aim at.

 

Anderson was vaguely aware that Dredd had started firing, but she didn’t have the time to pay attention to who he had hit. She ducked around the corner and took the assailants by surprise, firing quickly at the last places she’d fixed for their positions. Three of her stun bullets struck home, two missed, and one clipped her targets arm. The three she’d failed to hit dropped anyway; Dredd must have had better luck. 

 

“Hostiles down,” Dredd said.

 

“Understood, clearing weapons,” Anderson said, and moved quickly from person to person, gathering up what they’d dropped: five guns and a switchblade.

 

The only person moving in the alley, besides Anderson and Dredd, was a familiar pale, red-haired man, curled up in a ball and trembling with his face buried in his hands.

 

She looked at Dredd, and he nodded toward the technician, then pulled out a pair of cuffs from his belt and knelt by the nearest assailant. Anderson wasn’t sure how to take that; was he trying to remind her that she had spared the technician from arrest before, to remind her that she was on shaky ground?

 

She frowned and leaned over the technician. “Are you injured?” she asked, trying to get the right balance in her voice between compassionate and authoritative. 

 

The man didn’t respond, just held himself tighter. 

 

She sighed. “Please answer my question. I’m a Judge, and you are not currently suspected of a crime. You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

 

The technician slowly lowered his hands and peeked up at her. She winced. He was so pale he was almost gray, and his eyes looked even worse than they had before, the eyelids swollen and red and the eyes themselves barely seeming to move in his skull. From the way he squinted at her, she wasn’t even sure he could see her.

 

“Are you in need of emergency medical attention?” she asked, amending her question in light of his clearly terrible condition.

 

He slowly shook his head. 

 

“You are not currently suspected of a crime,” she repeated, in case it made him feel better. “But we would like to ask you a few questions. Are you willing to help us?”

 

There wasn’t really an option, she knew. They needed answers and were authorized to do whatever it took to get them. But she asked the question anyway. 

 

By the time he made any answer, Dredd had cuffed all the assailants, ordered a meat wagon to their location, and come up to stand behind Anderson. The technician glanced up at him, eyes as wide as they could go, then looked back at her and nodded. 

 

“Okay,” she said. “Good.” She looked over her shoulder at Dredd. “He’s not in good shape. It might be a good idea to get him some kind of medical attention before we question him.”

 

She was well aware that she was making the same mistake she’d made the first time, in Peach Trees, a mistake that Dredd had criticized her for then. But she didn’t let her uncertainty show on her face, and Dredd just nodded. 

 

“I’ll take these prisoners,” he said. “You take him to Dr. Akinyemi.”

 

Anderson reached out to help the technician to his feet. She remotely unlocked and called her bike, and it was there a moment later. 

 

“Can you ride with me?” she asked the technician. He nodded, and when he got on the bike behind her, he clung to her tightly, but she still rode slowly and took all her turns gently as they made their way back to the Hall of Justice. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter contains memories of traumatic and supremely unethical medical procedures.

It was easy to get to the Hall of Justice clinic from the garage without passing through any particularly populated areas of the building, which was a good thing, Anderson thought, because the technician was clearly deeply uncomfortable in the Judges’ headquarters. He kept his head down, letting his greasy hair fall into his face, and if any sound startled him, he inched toward Anderson, then seemed to realize what he’d done and flinched away again. She held his arm to guide him through the building, as it was clear that his vision was barely keeping him from plowing face-first into a wall, and she could feel him shaking. 

 

“I’m Judge Anderson. What’s your name?” Anderson asked as they walked, hoping to put him a little more at ease. 

 

“Techie,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

 

“Techie?” she asked. She wondered if she’d heard correctly. 

 

He shrugged. “It’s what they called me.”

 

“And before the Ma-Ma Clan? Did people call you that then, too?”

 

He brought his free arm up around himself, huddling as if he was cold. “I… I forgot,” he said, voice expressionless. 

 

They reached the clinic door before she could question him further, and Dr. Akinyemi bustled up to the entrance to look them over. 

 

“Who’s this?” she asked, eyebrows raised. 

 

Anderson considered telling Dr. Akinyemi that he was a person of interest in an open case, but she didn’t want to scare Techie. “This is Techie,” she said instead. “He needs to be looked over by a doctor. Could you help us?” 

 

Dr. Akinyemi made a face at her that said that she wasn’t happy about not being given the whole story, but she gestured them into her clinic anyway. “Of course I can,” she said. She turned to Techie and said, in a gentle tone of voice that Anderson had never heard her use except with the most grievously injured Judges, “My name is Beth. I’m a doctor. Could you hop up on that table for me?”

 

Anderson helped him over to the table, and he swung his head with its eery, unmoving eyes between them, squinting painfully. 

 

“You’re a doctor?” he asked Dr. Akinyemi. 

 

“I am,” she said, pulling over a wheeled tray covered in various instruments. He hunched over and seemed even more upset. “Do you not like doctors? It’s okay, you can tell me.” Techie shook his head almost imperceptibly. “Well, there’s different kinds of doctors,” Dr. Akinyemi continued, picking up a scanner off the tray. “You may not have met one like me before. This won’t hurt, I promise. Could you hold very still?”

 

Techie breathed very shallowly as Dr. Akinyemi hovered the scanner in front of him, starting from the top of his head and slowly bringing it down to his feet. After a change in the scanner’s settings, she gently pushed back the lids of his right eye and ran the scanner over the mechanical eye, then did the same on the left. “Hmm,” she said, looking at the readout and frowning. 

 

“I don’t have the drops that keep them working,” Techie said, sounding almost apologetic. “Ma-Ma had those. She’s gone now.”

 

Anderson reached into one of the pouches on her belt and pulled out the bottle from Ma-Ma’s safe. “These might be them.”

 

Techie cocked his head at her, narrowing his eyes as he tried to see what she was holding. Dr. Akinyemi plucked the bottle from her hand and tilted it. “Is this the bottle I ran that report on?” At Anderson’s nod, Dr. Akinyemi said, “Well, my guess is it is. Everything in it seems designed to keep a body from rejecting a roughly implanted mechanical part. Here.” She pressed the bottle into Techie’s hands. “Do you think this is the right bottle? Can you tell?”

 

Techie held it between his hands, held it close in front of his eyes, and finally nodded excitedly. “Yes, I mean, yeah, I think so. Can I please…?”

 

“Let me,” Dr. Akinyemi said. She tilted Techie’s head back and held the bottle over his eyes, dripping a few drops into each one. “Blink and let’s wait a few minutes and see if it worked. If it doesn’t, I’ve got a few other medicines we might try. In the meantime…” Dr. Akinyemi crossed to a large metal cabinet and pulled out a packet and a bottle of water. She opened the packet and poured a grayish-white powder out of it and into the water. She re-capped the bottle and shook it up, until the water and the powder had mixed together into a sluggishly-moving sludge. 

 

She handed the bottle to Techie, with a straw. “Drink that, please. It won’t hurt you, although it won’t taste good.”

 

Techie took a sip and wrinkled his nose with an expression of utter disgust, then controlled himself and went blank-faced again. He took a bracing breath and took another sip. 

 

“What is that?” Anderson asked. 

 

“Nutrient slurry,” Dr. Akinyemi said. “It’s exactly as gross as it sounds, but it’s effective in cases of malnutrition. I think the company that puts it out tried adding cocoa powder and sugar to it once, but it just made it worse somehow.”

 

Techie drained the bottle, wincing several times as he did so, and gave the bottle back to Dr. Akinyemi. “Thank you,” he said. 

 

“You’re the most polite patient I’ve ever had,” Dr. Akinyemi said dryly. “How are your eyes feeling?”

 

Techie tilted his head, blinked a few times, winced. “They don’t hurt as much. I can… sort of move them? They’re still blurry, but… I think a little better.”

 

Dr. Akinyemi nodded. “It’s hard to get the fluid all the way to the connection with the optic nerve when you can’t roll your eyes or blink very well. My professional opinion is that you should give it an hour or two, then take another dose. Now.” She grabbed a spare set of scrubs and a towel off a shelf. “There’s a chemical shower in the next room, I’ll show you.” Anderson was glad of the suggestion. She’d dealt with worse things, but she couldn’t deny that Techie smelled like old sweat and the petrochemical oiliness that covered everything in the city once you got off the main roads. 

 

With Techie safely in the next room, and the sound of running water starting up, Anderson asked, “What’s the verdict?”

 

Dr. Akinyemi shrugged. “He’s certainly malnourished, has a vibrant collection of bruises, compromised immune system due to stress and lack of proper diet. I wouldn’t be surprised if he catches every cold that comes near him for the next few months. Overall, I’d say his health is fragile but not an immediate emergency. Well, except for mental and emotional trauma, which I’m sure he’s got in spades but which isn’t within my expertise to treat, unfortunately. Those eyes are interesting, though.”

 

“What is it about the eyes?”

 

“They’re exceptional workmanship. I’ve seen a lot of prosthetics on people connected to criminals. I used to run a street clinic before I got hired by the Judges. Those are made of pretty cheap parts but put together very well, and the really strange thing is that they’re installed well. There’s no scarring or nerve damage around the implantation site like you’d usually expect from a back alley hack job. There’s no reason he should be so dependent on those eye drops. He should need to medicate once a week at the most.”

 

“I don’t get it.”

 

“Whoever put those eyes in his head could have easily installed them properly. They chose not to.”

 

Anderson didn’t ask her why someone would do that. It had only been a few days, and Techie had been rendered almost completely helpless without Ma-Ma. 

 

“So,” Dr. Akinyemi continued, flatly, raising an eyebrow at Anderson. “This sudden guest wouldn’t have anything to do with the gang you and Dredd busted three nights ago, would it?”

 

“He might have some information for us.”

 

Dr. Akinyemi frowned. “It wasn’t an easy decision, taking this job, you know?” she said. “I know that you protect people, and I think that, on the whole, the city is better off with Judges at work, but I also know what goes on in those interrogation rooms. You’ve made that kid my patient now, so keep that in mind when you start asking your questions. I don’t want to have to get pissed off at you. You don’t want that, either.”

 

Anderson actually didn’t want to piss Dr. Akinyemi off. The other woman wasn’t much bigger than Anderson, but she was several decades older and carried herself with complete surety. Anderson had always been a little intimidated by her. 

 

And, she realized, she didn’t particularly want to take Techie to one of the interrogation rooms, either. He stumbled out of the other room with his hair still wet and forming big wet patches on the shoulders of the scrubs. The clothes were laughably short in the sleeves and legs, but still managed to hang off him like he was a kid playing dress-up in his parents’ things.

 

“Um,” he said, shifting awkwardly, still barefoot and holding the towel in his hand. “So, um, you wanted to talk to me, right?” 

 

Anderson was used to the violence of an interrogation. It didn’t even bother her anymore. Usually. But it didn’t seem right to take him to one of those room. She had no doubt that Dredd would have something to say to her about this when he got back, but he’d chosen to pass her and select her for this assignment, so he could just deal with the way she wanted to do things. 

 

“Yeah,” she said, stepping forward and taking his arm so that she could guide him again. He flinched, but she thought it was instinct rather than pain. She tried to keep her touch light anyway. “Are you ready? Can you come with me?”

 

He nodded, staring at the ground, and she walked with him to the door.

 

“Bye, Dr. Akinyemi,” Anderson said over her shoulder, and Techie jumped in surprise and twisted to wave back in the general direction of the doctor. 

 

Dr. Akinyemi snorted and rolled her eyes. “I’m sure I’ll see you and Dredd later, Anderson. Bye, Techie.”

 

***

 

Techie felt kind of guilty for how relieved he was to leave the room with the doctor in it. She had been nothing but kind to him, and none of the things she’d done had even hurt, although the taste of that thing she’d had him drink had been so bad that he’d had to grind his teeth. 

 

He just didn’t like doctors. Or, well, he’d only met one doctor, before her. (Or, if he’d met more, he’d forgotten them.) He couldn’t help being afraid when she said she was a doctor, because it reminded him of the first time.

 

It reminded him of trying to force screams through a throat already so sore and scratched that it sounded more like wheezing, and the feeling of gauze shoved into the empty holes where his eyes had been, and Ma-Ma pushing his bloody hair away from his face and saying, in that tone of voice that he knew meant that she was smiling at something she thought was funny, “Oh, poor thing. Don’t worry, we’ll take you to the doctor.”

 

And after that, complete paralysis on a table in a room he couldn’t see, something being fitted over his head, the feeling of something, some machinery, inside his head, going in through the holes that his eyes had left behind, pulling and cutting and _stitching_ …

 

“Are you alright?” the Judge asked, looking at him worriedly. He looked up at her and saw that her outline was slightly more defined, that he could tell the difference between her light hair and her dark armor. The relief managed to push out the old, bad thoughts, and he nodded. 

 

The elevator door slid open, and the Judge took his arm again. She wasn’t squeezing hard or hurting him, but he wished she didn’t have to do it. He wished he could see his way around without anyone touching him. 

 

“Through here,” the Judge said. She guided him into a room and pulled over a chair. “Do you want to sit down?” He took the seat without saying anything. His heart was pounding and he wanted this process to be moving faster. What information was she looking for? If he knew, if he could just tell her everything right away… It wasn’t as if he had any loyalty to the Clan, now that Ma-Ma was gone. 

 

The Judge pressed something into his hand: the bottle with his medicine, again. “There’s a symbol on the bottom of this bottle…”

 

He couldn’t help the flinch. He couldn’t help jerking away from her, almost overturning the chair, and dropping the bottle onto the ground. He winced. 

 

“Yes,” he said. It felt like a struggle just to get a single word out. He didn’t want to talk about that.

 

“Do you… Do you know what the symbol is for?” she asked. She was close enough to him that he could see that her head was tilted to one side. Her voice sounded interested. There was no way he was getting out of this. She picked up the bottle and put it in his hand again, and he shoved it into the pocket of the scrubs, working up the courage to say something.

 

“The Stitch Maker,” he said, and without his intention, his jaw clenched shut after the words, as if to keep any more from escaping. As if just saying the name could make the thing itself appear.

 

“The Stitch Maker?” she said. He didn’t respond; he could barely draw in air, let alone speak. After a moment, she continued, “Did the Stitch Maker supply Ma-Ma with the raw materials to produce Slo-Mo?” He nodded jerkily. “And Ma-Ma provided him with bodies and body parts?” He nodded again. “Did the Stitch Maker replace your eyes with the mechanical ones?” Another nod. “Were you conscious for any period of time around the Stitch Maker? Or in his clinic?”

 

 _Oh, no, no, don’t ask that…_ He nodded. 

 

“Thank you,” Judge Anderson said. She reached out with a hand, not touching him but making sure her movement was in his line of sight. “You don’t have to tell me about it, I can look in your mind…”

 

“No!” he said quickly, then flinched. 

 

The Judge froze. “What’s wrong?”

 

Well, he’d already messed up. Might as well go all in. He took a deep breath and said, “Please don’t do that again. I can tell you, I can, please.” His words had come out smashed together and garbled; it would be a miracle, he thought accusingly at himself, if she had managed to understand what he was trying to say. 

 

***

 

Anderson took a step back, concerned. “Did… Did I hurt you, the last time?” She’d never been told by her trainers or teachers at the Hall of Justice that it hurt, but then Judges were used to pain.

 

He shook his head, staring down at the floor. “No, but… I could feel you _inside_ my head, like…” He trailed off, swallowing hard as if he was trying to keep down nausea. He looked up at her, squinting. “I just didn’t like it. It’s okay, if you want to, I… But, you know, I’ll answer your questions. I can talk.”

 

She looked at him, in Dr. Akinyemi’s borrowed scrubs because he had nothing of his own and nowhere to go. His eyes twitched and whirred in his head as he tried to move them. They weren’t his own eyes, and they hadn’t been his choice. She thought that the inside of his head was probably the only thing he had left that felt like it was really his own.

 

She nodded and pulled over the other chair, then saw her water bottle on her desk and picked that up, as well. She handed it to him and sat to face him. “Thank you, Techie. I’ll just ask you questions. You can pause and drink some of that if you need to.”

 

He held up the bottle, narrowing his eyes. “It’s not… the same stuff that doctor had, is it?”

 

Anderson grinned, then put a neutral expression on her face, just in case he could see her. “No. It’s just water. Are you ready to begin?”

 

Techie took a sip of water and nodded. 

 

“Okay. Please tell me everything you can remember about the Stitch Maker. Don’t leave anything out, it could all be important.”

 

“Um…” Techie closed his eyes. “I blacked out, for a little bit, when Ma-Ma… When… Well, she woke me up and there was cotton in the sockets, and she said she would take me to the doctor. And I couldn’t see where we were going, but I knew the general area, because I’d seen the cargo information for the Slo-Mo stuff, and the other stuff, the… bodies. I can show you that, on a map, if…”

 

“That would be helpful, Techie, thank you,” Anderson said, trying to sound encouraging. “What can you tell me about the trip?”

 

“We went in a car,” Techie said. “Caleb was there, he kept a hand over my mouth so I wasn’t too loud. Then they pulled me out of the car and carried me down a flight of stairs. Not a lot of stairs, maybe… Less than one of the flights between floors in Peach Trees? And a door closed behind us, the stairs were inside, because the sound of the street was cut off. Like, almost completely. And then at the bottom of the stairs was a room where… All the sound was muffled. I think the whole room was soundproofed. And…”

 

Anderson waited as Techie scrambled to open the bottle and take another sip of water, his hands shaking. He kept his eyes closed and slowly capped the bottle again. 

 

“I could hear Ma-Ma talking to someone. A stranger. But I was… making noise again, they put me on a table and then I was injected with something and… after that I couldn’t move.”

 

“Was the person Ma-Ma was talking to the Stitch Maker?” Anderson asked. “Did you hear his voice?”

 

Techie nodded. “But,” he said, “it wasn’t… right. It wasn’t his real voice.”

 

“What do you mean? How did it sound?”

 

“It was metallic. Sort of… distorted.”

 

“He was using a voice modifier?”

 

Techie frowned and fiddled with the bottle. “Yes. I heard him talk again after I couldn’t move anymore, so I wasn’t scream… I wasn’t making noise.”

 

“Do you remember what he said?”

 

“You weren’t supposed to break it,” Techie said, and it took Anderson a second to realize that the words weren’t meant for her. They were the Stitch Maker’s words. “I can fix it, of course, but I’m disappointed in you, Ma-Ma.”

 

Anderson blinked, surprised. “How did Ma-Ma react?”

 

“She laughed. And I think she said something but… The Stitch Maker had gotten started and I couldn’t really, um, focus on anything else.”

 

“Ah,” Anderson said. “I understand.”

 

“That’s all, because I, well, I passed out sometime during it and when I woke up I was being taken back up the stairs and there was a bandage over my face. And then we went back to Peach Trees and that’s all. That’s all I remember about the Stitch Maker.”

 

Anderson nodded. “That’s okay. Thank you for telling me. The people who were attacking you when we found you, did they say anything to you? Did they know who you were?”

 

Techie stayed quiet for a long time, rolling the water bottle back and forth in his hands. Anderson waited patiently. “No,” he said finally. “No, they didn’t say anything. I don’t think I knew them, or anything, but my eyes weren’t…”

 

Anderson opened her mouth to ask another question, but Dredd walked through the door and drew her attention. 

 

“Interrogated the assailants,” he said simply. He swung his helmeted head toward Techie, as if to make it very clear that he was aware of him, then back to Anderson. “What’s going on here?”

 

“A conversation,” Anderson said. “Techie’s answering all my questions.” Dredd stared at her, his head tilted just slightly to one side and standing eerily still. She stared back at him, refusing to be baited. If he was curious about the fact that she wasn’t using her psychic abilities, he could ask her.

 

Instead, he finally said, “Follow me. Both of you.”

 

Anderson helped Techie up and they followed Dredd into an empty conference room down the hall. There was a large paper bag on the table that gave off warmth and smelled amazing. 

 

“Is that food?” Anderson asked, a little unnecessarily. She suddenly realized that she was ravenous.

 

Her face must have looked surprised because Dredd said, a touch of sarcasm in his voice, “The Hall of Justice isn’t asking us to starve.”

 

He reached into the bag and pulled out plastic containers of broth, noodles, herbs and peppers, and thin-sliced raw beef. There were three containers of each and three sets of chopsticks.

 

Anderson put all the ingredients together in the broth, stirred it a little as the beef cooked, then set to with a will. She had to stop eating after a minute so that she could catch her breath. Techie was hunched over his own food, so close that his hair came close to falling into the broth, and had his arms curled around the container like he was worried someone was going to yank it away from him. To Anderson’s amusement (although she was careful to keep it from showing on her face), Dredd had kept his helmet on to eat. His blank, visor-covered gaze fell on the table, or maybe on the other two people in the room, or maybe on nothing. 

 

The warm food made the tension in her shoulders and neck unwind, despite herself. She was still involved in an open investigation, unsure of her future among the Judges, and sitting next to a former criminal conspirator of uncertain loyalty and a superior officer whose opinion of her was a complete mystery. But she felt almost calm. 

 

Until, of course, an alert chimed from Dredd’s tablet. That made her shoulders tense up all over again.

 

***

 

Techie had lied to the Judge, of course, when she’d asked if the attackers in the alley had said anything to him, and the tension of that weighed him down. It made him feel both terrified and guilty, but he didn’t understand what they’d said, and if he didn’t understand it, he didn’t want to tell the Judges about it, in case it made them want to hurt him in some way he hadn’t anticipated.

 

 _The Stitch Maker puts that mark on his blanks. He doesn’t like his things just wandering around_. 

 

It didn’t make any sense. He’d only encountered the Stitch Maker once. All he’d done was fix Techie’s eyes.

 

He’d forgotten a lot about his life, but surely he wouldn’t have forgotten about another experience as terrible as that.

 

Would he? 

 

With his mind whirling so chaotically, the alarm from the Judge’s tablet startled him like a physical blow. Techie froze at the sound. He swiveled his head toward the two Judges and swung his gaze between them. He could move his eyes with only minimal pain at this point, and his vision was clearing up by the minute, but he thought it might be a good idea to seem more helpless than he was for a little while longer. 

 

What was it he’d always heard Kay ranting about the Judges? _They’d kill a baby out of his mother’s arms and say that he looked suspicious_. No point getting too comfortable.

 

A split-second, inane thought flashed through his head: the alert was to tell the Judges that he’d lied to them. His heart slammed against his ribs. He sternly told himself that that was ridiculous; what possible alert could they have for that? He was just getting himself worked up for no reason.

 

“What is it?” the younger Judge, Anderson, asked. 

 

The older Judge, the terrifying one in the helmet whose name Techie still didn’t know, set down his chopsticks and picked up his tablet with slow, deliberate motions. He stared at the tablet through his blank visor. 

 

“Lead,” he said gruffly. “On the Stitch Maker.”

 

Anderson leaned forward eagerly. Techie looked down at his food again, trying not to let his confusion show on his face. He shouldn’t get involved. It wasn’t any of his business. He picked up the plastic container and tilted it to his mouth, drinking the broth silently and hoping no one paid him too much attention.  

 

“What kind of lead?” Anderson asked. 

 

“I set up a search through street camera footage for the symbol, the alpha and omega,” the faceless Judge answered. 

 

Judge Anderson got to her feet and stood next to the faceless Judge, looking over his shoulder at the tablet. “How long has that been there?”

 

“Three hours,” the faceless Judge said. 

 

They both turned to look at Techie. He tried to shrink in his seat and, not for the first time, wished he wasn’t so tall and gangly. 

 

Anderson took the tablet and flipped it toward him. He pulled it close to him and squinted until the screen swam into view. On the screen was a grainy image of a street corner. All of the walls were heavily graffitied, but the camera had placed a helpful box around the alpha and omega symbol, painted small and low on one wall, the colors carefully matched to the tags around it. As if it was supposed to blend in.

 

Techie barely restrained himself from laughing. 

 

“Have you ever been to this area of the city before?” Anderson asked, gently and carefully. As if he was a spooked animal and she was worried he’d try to run. She must know that he knew how trapped he really was. There wasn’t anywhere he could run. 

 

“No,” he said, and shook his head vehemently. 

 

The faceless Judge nodded sharply. “It’s a mobile operation, with multiple boltholes. The Stitch Maker signals his current location…”

 

“No,” Techie said, cutting him off, and immediately cringed. 

 

This was so stupid. He shouldn’t say anything. He didn’t belong to these Judges, he didn’t owe them anything. 

 

But they hadn’t hurt him yet. They’d fed him. They’d fixed up his eyes. So far they’d been as good as Ma-Ma had been in her very best moments. 

 

Anderson raised an eyebrow at him. He took a deep breath. “This doesn’t happen,” he said, pointing at finger at the screen of the tablet. 

 

“What do you mean?” Anderson asked. 

 

Techie frowned, frustrated. “The Stitch Maker offers his services. He doesn’t advertise them. He contacts people, he tells them where to be. _This_ ,” he pointed at the screen again, more emphatically, “doesn’t happen.”

 

Both Anderson and the faceless Judge stiffened. Anderson took a step away from Techie, glancing all around the room, her gaze landing on light fixtures, switches, outlets. Anywhere something could be hidden. 

 

“Sir,” she said, “Judge Dredd.” She had lowered her voice, was leaning toward the other Judge, but if the room had been bugged, Techie knew, she’d probably be picked up anyway. “How public was your search?”

 

“It wasn’t,” Judge Dredd growled, pushing himself to his feet, his entire body tensed like he wanted to explode into a flurry of movement. “It would take a hell of a security breach for anyone to have access to it.”

 

“Or a hell of a security clearance,” Anderson finished, her voice grim. “It’s a trap.”

 

***

 

Anderson felt as if the room had suddenly gotten quite a bit smaller. She supposed there was a chance that someone from outside, someone acting for the Stitch Maker the way Techie had acted for Ma-Ma, could have penetrated the Hall of Justice security. But she didn’t think that was the case.

 

What had Dredd said? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire? There was still a fire going within the Hall of Justice itself. 

 

“Judge Anderson,” Dredd said, his voice very calm considering the situation. “What am I thinking right now?”

 

Her eyes widened in shock, but she didn’t argue, just concentrated and pushed her way into his mind. He was thinking something so loudly that for a moment it was disorienting. 

 

He was imagining a route through the city, from the Hall of Justice into the warren of neighborhoods in Sector 13. The route wound and backtracked and cut through uncomfortably small roads and alleys, and she knew, perhaps because he knew, that it would keep her out of sight of most of the cameras. 

 

The route ended at a tower block with the words “River View” above the door. Up the stairs he imagined going, to a door marked with the number 1734. The door had a keypad. Dredd imagined putting in the code 3192012914. 

 

The thought of this route, this door, was suffused so completely with the idea of safety that Anderson didn’t think Dredd had done it on purpose. 

 

“Take him,” Dredd said, jerking his head toward Techie. “And this,” he quickly disconnected his tablet from the Hall of Justice network and handed it to her, along with a drive he pulled from a pocket of his armor. “Files from Ma-Ma’s servers. Have him take a look, see what he can find.”

 

“And you?” Anderson asked, although she had a sinking feeling she knew the answer. 

 

“It’s still a lead,” Dredd said. “But that’s no reason to let our current lead out of our sight. You take the technician, I’ll take the trap.”

 

Anderson wanted to argue, but knew it would do no good. Instead she just nodded. “See you later, Judge Dredd,” she said firmly, absurdly like she was giving him an order. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains canon-typical fight violence and original character death.

Anderson knew that there were safe houses scattered throughout Megacity One. There were a lot of situations in which a Judge might need to get their profile low, or protect a witness, or store some vital piece of evidence. Anderson had been required as part of her training to memorize the locations of all the safe houses in her district and the four that shared borders with it.

 

She was quite sure that Dredd’s safe house was not one of them. 

 

River View was a smaller block, about one sixteenth the size of Peach Trees, in a nondescript area that wasn’t particularly run-down but wasn’t particularly nice, either. It also was nowhere near a river of any kind. 

 

Anderson parked her bike in a deserted alley a few streets over from River View and told it to fold itself down into a square that didn’t look particularly like a motorcycle unless you got close. Then she unclipped the bike’s storage box, stripped out of her armor, packed it away and hoisted the box up in one arm. She looped her other arm through Techie’s and tried to look inconspicuous and unmemorable. 

 

Luckily, no one tried to talk to them, either inside or outside the block. No one even looked at them for more than a second. This was apparently a neighborhood where people kept their heads down and their noses out of their neighbors’ business. Anderson was thankful for that, since she felt completely unprotected in the soft pants and shirt she’d worn under her uniform. Judging from Techie’s trembling, he was just as jumpy as she was.

 

Anderson saw a few people waiting for the elevator just inside the door to River View, so she changed directions and pulled Techie toward the stairs. No one said anything to them. They met no one on the stairs. She wondered what they looked like, a muscular woman in an undershirt and leggings leading a gangly man in ill-fitting scrubs and barefoot. She really hoped that they didn’t pique anyone’s curiosity. 

 

They left the stairwell on the seventeenth floor and hurried through the hallway to apartment 1734. Anderson keyed in the door code as quickly as possible and didn’t feel her pulse start to slow until she’d gotten them both inside and the door closed behind them. 

 

She set the storage box down on the floor and took a deep breath, letting it out in a sigh. 

 

“Well,” she said. “Here we are.”

 

Techie didn’t say anything, just shuffled to the sofa on one wall and sat down, staring back at her wordlessly. 

 

Anderson looked around, a little unsettled by the normalcy of the safe house. It was a very small apartment, but it didn’t feel cramped because there was very little in it. The main room had only a sofa, a table, and a battered old television, and the attached kitchen seemed to be limitedly appointed. Two doors at one end of the room seemed to lead into an equally small bathroom and bedroom. 

 

Idly, she opened the refrigerator and was astonished to find that it was packed with food. All of it looked pretty fresh. It was so bizarre for a safe house, which might not have people in it for months at a time, that Anderson just stared at it for a long moment.

 

She felt as if everything she’d gained from the pho Dredd had brought them had been burned off by her adrenaline. She grabbed two oranges out of the refrigerator and swung the door closed. 

 

“Do you want one?” she asked Techie. He squinted at the orange she was holding up and nodded. She set it on the table in front of him and sat on the other side of the sofa, digging her thumb nail into the peel and starting to pull it up. 

 

“Um…” Techie trailed off, looking at her out of the corner of his eye. 

 

“What is it?” she asked.

 

He pulled the little bottle out of the pocket of his scrubs and held it out to her.

 

“Do you… not want to keep that yourself?” Anderson asked, confused. 

 

“No,” Techie said, pulling the bottle back toward himself. “Just… Can I use it again? I think I would be able to do stuff for you better, and I wouldn’t miss anything…”

 

“Of course you can,” Anderson cut him off. “You can use it whenever you need to.”

 

He didn’t look entirely convinced, and darted his eyes at her suspiciously. He turned a little away from her, tilted his head back, and dropped a little bit of liquid into each eye.

 

She watched him and wondered about the days he’d spent hiding after they’d taken down Ma-Ma. Had he wanted to run somewhere else? Try to find someone to help him? Were the members of the Ma-Ma Clan really the only people he had?

 

“How long were you working for Ma-Ma?” Anderson asked carefully. 

 

Techie turned to look at her, then away again. “Three years,” he said quietly. “I think. Maybe four.”

 

“What did you do before that?”

 

He shrugged. “I forgot.”

 

Anderson stared at him, but he didn’t seem nervous. He showed no sign that he was lying. He said it as if it was just a simple fact. 

 

“What do you mean, you forgot?”

 

“I just… forgot.” For the first time, Techie’s voice held a hint of displeasure; he sounded a little annoyed. He must have noticed it, too, because he flinched and looked at her fearfully. When she didn’t react to his tone, he took a breath and continued, “I was just… there. Ma-Ma said I belonged to her. So that’s where I stayed.”

 

“What do you remember about your life before Ma-Ma?” 

 

“Nothing.”

 

He said it as if there was nothing strange about that, but Anderson knew memory. She’d first accidentally stumbled into someone else’s memory when she was eight years old, and she had experienced half a hundred ways for people to organize their minds since then. You didn’t just spring into being at… how old was he, thirty? You didn’t just lose everything before that point as if it had been excised with a scalpel. 

 

She was desperately curious to get into his mind again, take a closer look this time, but she didn’t ask. Instead, she said, “Who taught you to use computers the way you do?”

 

“No one. It took me a couple of days, but then it all just clicked and I understood it.”

 

“Natural ability?”

 

“They knew it was going to happen,” Techie said quietly. “They put me in front of the computers right away. Ma-Ma knew I would understand it.” Techie shrugged. “I should probably look at the other Judge’s tablet. And the data he took from Ma-Ma’s servers.”

 

“His name is Dredd,” Anderson said, as she got up and crossed to the storage box. “He kept me alive in Peach Trees.”

 

“I remember him,” Techie said, noncommittal, and didn’t seem inclined to say anything else. 

 

***

 

Dredd’s first instinct was to approach the trap from above, try to claim the high ground. As he scoped out the location from a rooftop a few blocks away, however, he saw that the Stitch Maker, or his proxies, had chosen the location well. The building on which the graffiti had been inked was several floors taller than the surrounding buildings, and set in a block surrounded by wide roads. There wasn’t any way to get onto the roof without approaching from the ground, which was what he wanted to avoid in the first place.

 

He scanned the base of the building. There were three men playing cards around a milk crate on one corner of the block, within sight of the graffiti. Obvious. A young couple was ducked into an alcoved doorway, apparently having some kind of tryst, but they were positioned so that both could see the street and they were wearing enough clothing to cover weapons or armor. The doorway was deep enough that he couldn’t see whether the door was open or closed. There could be other assailants waiting there. 

 

There would almost certainly be others that he couldn’t see. If whoever had set this trap had any sense at all, they wouldn’t leave any approach unguarded. And the streets, though not as busy as one of the city’s main thoroughfares, had enough people moving along them to make any kind of shootout a major risk. There was no doubt in his mind that the Stitch Maker’s people would care much less about collateral damage than he did.

 

He might have felt afraid, if he had allowed himself to feel anything at all. Instead, he scanned carefully back and forth across the blocks surrounding the building, methodically searching for anything he could use. 

 

_Ah. That might do_. 

 

It would require him to move quickly. The Stitch Maker’s people were probably more familiar with the neighborhood than he was, so he couldn’t give up the initiative. 

 

He folded up his binoculars and slipped them back in his belt, then climbed down the fire escape.

 

He kept away from the main road until he came to a narrow alley between two haphazardly constructed apartment complexes. It was dark and wet and smelled awful, and it therefore was given a wide berth by everyone passing through the neighborhood. And one of the buildings had put out their garbage bins there, presumably so that they wouldn’t have to keep them clean enough to store in one of the designated areas.

 

Ignoring the smell, he set his shoulder against one of the bins and shoved it into place, its rusted wheels squeaking, then moved the other out next to it so that they formed a barrier across the middle of the alley. Then he planted a small concussion mine on the first bin and placed another on the other side of the second one. Then he took a deep breath, pushed any hint of nervousness or anticipation down deep, and walked into the trap.

 

He strode out in front of the graffiti-tagged building and walked past the men playing cards without looking at them. He also didn’t look at the ostensible amorous couple further ahead. Instead, he tried to project complete confidence. He stopped in front of the graffiti, made a show of turning in place to photograph the entire area through his helmet cameras. 

 

Then he walked away and, despite the prickling along the back of his neck, the feeling of eyes watching him, he didn’t look back. 

 

It was possible that his attackers had less information than he was giving them credit for, but he had to assume that they knew this area of the city better than he did. To do anything else would be to leave himself open to being caught off guard. So they would certainly know that the alley existed, and they would know that, with their numbers, they could split and show up at either end. If he was stupid enough to enter the alley, they could easily trap him there.

 

He ducked into the alley.

 

He crouched against the wall and kept perfectly still and listened very carefully. 

 

He heard footsteps, hesitant and wary, coming from both openings of the alley. He tried to count; at least four people coming from each direction. He carefully and quietly unholstered his gun, checked the ammo, tensed, waited. 

 

“Alright, Judge!” a voice shouted from the other side of the dumpster wall. Dredd resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Criminals always had to monolog. “If you give up now, you… What?”

 

No more time to wait. They’d noticed the wall. He looked up and saw four people round the corner into the alley on his side. 

 

Then he triggered the concussion mines, ducking his head as the sound wave caused his helmet to inflate pads around his ears. 

 

His attackers weren’t so lucky. The sound and shock waves dizzied them and left them less able to get out of the way when the two dumpsters rocketed in opposite directions down the alley, bowling people over with meaty thumps as they went. 

 

Hopefully at least some of the attackers were incapacitated. There was no time to assess the damage. He jumped back to his feet, chose his direction, and attacked.

 

_Attempted murder of a Judge, the penalty is death_ , he recited to himself as he brought his gun around. Two people in front of him were down, one unmoving and the other attempting to get to his feet, but there were two people still standing, and they had guns as well. _Initiative, speed_ , he fired quickly and brought them down, _don’t lose the initiative, don’t lose the speed_ , the man who had been on the ground was reaching into the back of his waistband and he saw the stock of a gun and he fired again, he was down, he turned to the other end of the alley…

 

A jolt of unpleasant surprise as he saw that two people were on their feet and running toward them as if nothing had happened. As if there had been no shock from the concussion mines. Both seemed to have combat training, given the compact, efficient way they moved and the way their eyes never left him. 

 

And both had blurred, scrawled blue tattoos on their foreheads.

 

But only one of them was drawing a gun. So that was what he had to deal with first.

 

He hit the ground and the tattooed man fired a moment later. He rolled and kicked out, hitting the gunman in the ankle and using the momentum to get back on his feet. The gunman had already rolled onto his back, as if the impact with the ground hadn’t affected him at all, and was bringing his gun up.

 

No other option. No matter how much he wanted to question the man. Dredd fired.

 

And then he was slammed into the wall by the other tattooed man, who was reaching relentlessly for Dredd’s gun. Dredd couldn’t get it into a position to fire, so instead of trying to pull his gun free, he pushed into the other man’s hold, shoved him off-balance, and slammed his gun into the side of the man’s head. 

 

The tattooed man slumped, limbs twitching as he tried to catch himself. Dredd caught him instead, and put the barrel of his gun against the man’s ribs. 

 

He heard noises, voices further down the alley. He didn’t try to attack them. He had someone to question.

 

He dragged the tattooed man after him out of the alley.

 

***

 

One of the things that rookie Judges were trained to do was to “skim sleep.” You could keep yourself drifting on the surface of sleep, not sinking far enough to completely lose awareness of what was going on around you but resting enough to keep you from collapsing. It wasn’t the most restful sleep in the world, but it could keep a Judge going when real sleep wasn’t an option. 

 

Once Techie was set up with everything he needed, including a few extra snacks pulled from the refrigerator that he hadn’t asked for but that Anderson thought he might need at some point, she curled up on the other side of the couch, slowed her breathing, and let herself drop until she was skimming sleep. 

 

She didn’t dream, of course, but her thoughts fractured a bit, pulling like taffy and twisting in odd directions. She wondered about Dredd, hoped he was alright, admitted to herself that there was a part of her that was as eager to hear what new information he’d discovered as to be assured he was still alive. She was a Judge, after all. 

 

She found herself running through her memories of Peach Trees, and a slow crawling prickling spread over her skin, a refracted, distant memory of the anxiety and terror she’d felt making her way through the hostile tower block. 

 

And with a sudden, half-conscious shift of her memory, she thought of how it had felt to sift through Techie’s mind when she’d found him in Ma-Ma’s server room. It _had_ felt strange, she realized; she’d been too focused to think carefully about it at the time, and had assumed that any strangeness was a result of his all-encompassing fear. 

 

But there was something odd about his mind, something…

 

She snapped fully awake suddenly. Her mouth was dry and her pulse was racing. She had tried very hard not to think about Peach Trees in the intervening days, and she had to take a second to close her eyes tightly and breathe. 

 

She glanced over at Techie, in front of his solitary, small screen. She had been aware, as she slept, that he was keeping very still at the other end of the sofa, and now she saw that it was because he’d fallen asleep, too. 

 

_No one taught him how to skim_ , she thought, amused at how deeply asleep he was. He’d curled himself up with one arm thrown over his head, and he was breathing with uneven snuffles; apart from that, he was nearly as still as stone. 

 

She stood and stretched. She still felt jumpy, uncomfortable in her own skin. She flipped on the light in the kitchen, hoping it would make her stop jumping at shadows. 

 

She thought again of the referral Dr. Akinyemi had given her. _Dr. Felix Zapata, Post-Trauma Therapy Specialist_. 

 

The fact that the Hall of Justice had a recommended therapist was information that was readily available to any Judge, but Anderson had heard other Judges, from rookies to seniors, talking about people who made appointments with him with everything from laughing scorn to stony disapproval. It was all confidential, of course, but if anyone found out… She was probably on thin ice already. 

 

A spike of anger lanced through her. What the hell did she care what any other Judges thought of her? She was supposed to fail her test, but here she was anyway. She’d done what she thought was right in Peach Trees, and she’d keep doing what she thought was right from here on out. 

 

She poured herself a glass of water. There’d be time enough to make that decision after this case was closed. 

 

She pulled open a gap in the curtains and was startled to see that the sky was starting to lighten toward dawn. She was tempted to try to contact Dredd, but if other Judges could monitor their communications it might give them a way to find Anderson’s and Dredd’s locations. She would just have to trust that Dredd knew what he was doing.

 

She put a hand on Techie’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Techie,” she said softly, trying not to startle him, and then wincing when she failed completely.

 

He jerked upright, not lashing out or flailing but instead compacting himself, drawing his arms in across his torso and flinching back into the couch cushions. He blinked up at her, eyes wide and horrified. 

 

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to sleep, I was working, I swear, I’ll get back to work, I wasn’t slacking off intentionally, I swear, I’m sorry, just give me a second, please, please…”

 

“Techie, it’s okay, really…” He didn’t even seem to hear her, his eyes squeezed shut and his breathing edging toward hyperventilation. He was terrified, and she suddenly realized that he probably had been for a while. He had no more idea than she did about what was going on, and if all he remembered was Ma-Ma, then all he remembered was pain.

 

She was frustrated with herself. She had always thought she had a better understanding of people, that her abilities gave her insight that no one else could match, but now that she’d promised Techie she wouldn’t set foot in his mind she felt like she’d hamstrung herself. Could she really not figure out how to put him at ease without using her psychic abilities?

 

She knelt on the floor in front of the sofa, so that she wasn’t looming over him anymore. Carefully, she reached out and rested her fingers gently on the back of his hand. His panicked rambling cut off abruptly, and he stared at her, frozen.

 

“Techie, it’s fine. You can sleep. It’s fine.” He nodded jerkily. “Do you want a glass of water?” she asked. 

 

He flinched, blinked again. “Um… Yes?”

 

“I slept, too,” she said as she filled another glass. “It’s important to make sure we’re all working at our best.”

 

He took the water from her and gulped it down quickly, staring at her over the rim of the glass and still tense.

 

She sighed and sat down again. 

 

“I should get back to work,” Techie said hesitantly.

 

She looked over at him. “That would be good. Thank you for helping us, Techie.”

 

“Could I…” Techie glanced at the television. Anderson followed his gaze. It was several years out of date, and had a few scratches and some wear and tear on the cords, but she thought it would still work. “Could I watch that?”

 

“What, you mean, while you work?”

 

“The noise,” Techie said, and clarified, “I like it. It helps me focus. Sometimes, when I was learning a new thing or a new system or doing something tricky, and needed to concentrate, Ma-Ma would let me watch. It helps, I promise. I’ll work quickly.”

 

“Okay,” Anderson said, looking around until she found the remote. She handed it to him. “Do you want something else to eat?” He nodded and she left him on the couch and returned to the refrigerator to look. 

 

She wondered again at the amount of food there was. The cupboards were full of dishes and cooking utensils, spices and dried grains and cans, and the refrigerator had fresh things that had to have been bought within the past few days. It didn’t make sense for a safe house. It was like a sparsely furnished home. She could have cooked a three-course meal if she’d been up for it. 

 

Instead she moved from the cupboards to the refrigerator, grabbing a bunch of bananas, a couple of granola bars, and a container of dried chili-crusted anchovies and carrying them back to the living room. 

 

Techie had chosen some kind of outer-space drama that looked as though it had been filmed on a budget so shoe-string that it was almost fraying. She frowned at it for a moment before realizing that she recognized it. 

 

“I didn’t know this was still on!” Anderson said, sitting down on the couch with more force than necessary. Techie bounced slightly and hurried to steady the tablet on his lap. He managed to glimpse him send her a stern look before he remembered himself and looked fearfully at the ground again. 

 

“It’s good background noise,” Techie said.

 

“I used to watch it as a kid,” Anderson said, trailing off. Her father had loved it. He had been a child before the wars and calamities, when there were still governments and companies sending people into space. It had been his dream; he’d wake her and her mother up every Saturday morning to watch the new episode and talk about what it would be like up there. 

 

No one went up there anymore. And her parents were long dead.

 

“It’s my favorite, too,” Techie whispered, and bent his head to focus on his work. 

 

It was almost hypnotic, sitting next to him, hearing the tapping of his fingers, now fast, now slow, against the tablet. She watched the show with half of her attention, appreciating the motion and the long-remembered sets more than anything else, and picked up the container of anchovies to snack on. 

 

She offered them to Techie. He reached out without looking, then glanced at the food and stopped his hand in midair.

 

“They have eyes,” he said, sounding horrified.

 

“They’re whole,” Anderson said. “They’re small enough it doesn’t matter, you can just crunch them.”

 

“Oh,” Techie said, and reached for a granola bar instead. Anderson smiled and ate another handful of anchovies.

 

Suddenly, she became aware of a soft beeping that was not part of the show. It was coming from the apartment’s bedroom. Anderson tensed and slowly set the container down.

 

“What?” Techie whispered, flinching away from her with wide eyes.

 

“It’s okay,” Anderson said, slowly getting up off the couch and touching a hand to her gun. “I’m going to check something out.”

 

She eased the door of the bedroom open wider and looked around. Like the living room, there wasn’t a lot in the room: a small chest of drawers, a bedside table, and an enormous bed that took up most of the room. The bed had been perfectly, crisply made, but there was a divot in one of the pillows, showing that it had been slept in recently. 

 

There was no one else there, and the only small window was covered with a blackout curtain. She relaxed her grip on the stock of her gun and followed the sound of the beeping. 

 

It was hidden well: a palm-sized two-way communicator, stamped with the Hall of Justice emblem, folded up small and placed between the bed frame and mattress. She pulled it out and flipped it open.

 

_Incoming call. Accept?_

 

She accepted the call. Immediately, the Chief Judge’s voice came from the communicator. 

 

“Judge Dredd.” There was a veneer of amusement over her voice, but it was tense and hard. “I was beginning to think you weren’t going to answer.”

 

“Ma’am,” Anderson said. “This is Judge Anderson. Judge Dredd is… following up a lead.”

 

“Ah,” the Chief Judge said. “But you’re his partner on this case?”

 

“Yes, ma’am,” Anderson said, confused.

 

“Good. This channel of communication is completely disconnected from the Hall of Justice system, so it’s unlikely to be compromised, but I want to make this quick. The perpetrators of the street assault that Dredd brought in earlier?”

 

“What about them?”

 

“They weren’t talking at first, so Dredd left them to simmer in a set of isocubes, to try to put a crack in the armor. And now they’re gone.”

 

“Gone? Gone where?”

 

“If I knew that, Judge Anderson,” the Chief Judge said dryly, “I wouldn’t have a problem, would I?”

 

“Someone released them,” Anderson said, putting it together.

 

“A Judge. I have no idea who yet, although I have some leads of my own I’m following up. But I wanted to let you know. And Dredd reported to me that you were looking into a chop operation run by a criminal alias Stitch Maker?”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

“I have some information for you about him.”

 

Anderson’s heart leapt with excitement. “There wasn’t a file on him, that we could find.” 

 

“That’s because everything’s been erased from the archives on the Hall’s servers. However, I have some hard-copy files left by my predecessor.”

 

That surprised Anderson. The Chief Judge had taken over from her predecessor nearly a decade ago. “That old?” Anderson asked. “He’s been in operation that long?”

 

“Most of the activity linked to him in the files was from fifteen to twenty years ago. Mutilated bodies that confidential informers said were his work, plus a few instances where crime bosses we thought were mortally wounded appeared having been put back together by him. He seemed to operate as a doctor for hire, with an extracurricular interest in strange surgeries. And then he went dark twelve years ago. If he’s been operating since I took over, it was recorded on the server. I’m starting to regret my emphasis on going paperless.”

 

Her voice was wry, self-deprecating, but Anderson imagined that she was as unsettled by the case as Anderson was. Or maybe not; maybe after so many years as a Judge, she was ready for anything. But surely being betrayed by her own people would leave a mark even on the Chief Judge.

 

“I can update you on…” Anderson started.

 

“No,” the Chief Judge interrupted, sounding reluctant. “I think this channel is safe, but I’m not sure of anything. Besides, my office is right in the middle of what has become a dangerous situation. There may be unfortunate consequences.”

 

It took Anderson a moment to realize that the Chief Judge was referencing the potential for her to be captured and tortured, if there were enough rogue Judges in the building with her.

 

“I’ll just have to trust you and Judge Dredd,” the Chief Judge said. “I have sent out a general order that all Judges are to steer clear of you and avoid interfering in anything you’re doing, no matter where they see you. So if you are approached by a Judge…”

 

“Understood, ma’am,” Anderson said. “I won’t hesitate.”

 

“I’m sure you understand, Judge Anderson,” the Chief Judge said, her voice gone icy, “that I am not happy about this situation. Figure this out so we can get back to work.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

“And tell Dredd…” The Chief Judge sighed. “Tell him I apologize for this call.”

 

Anderson’s eyes widened in shock. “I…”

 

“Just tell him.”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

The communicator gave a _click_ and went dead.

 

Anderson went straight into the living room again. It made her nervous to leave Techie alone for so long; as cooperative as he’d been, he was still a former gang member. But Techie was sitting just where she’d left him, holding tightly to the tablet and staring at it unseeingly, his eyes wide and his face pale.

 

“What is it?” she asked him. 

 

He looked up sharply and his words tumbled out haphazardly as he said, “No-nothing, I… It’s just that the person who planted the false image, they, um, they bounced through a bunch of different addresses and I can’t… I can’t be sure that it originated from the Hall of Justice.”

 

“That’s fine,” Anderson said grimly. “I’d be willing to bet good money that it did.”

 

He didn’t say anything else, and his fingers flew into motion over the tablet’s screen. She sat down next to him again, watching him out of the corner of her eye. Maybe he had just been frightened that he would be punished for failure. But she wasn’t sure.

 

_He’s hiding something from me_ , she realized, with mingled tension and absurd disappointment. 

 

She could dip into his mind. But he would know she was doing it. It would destroy any trust she’d managed to forge between them. 

 

She hoped Dredd was doing better with the trap.

 

She hoped Dredd was still alive.

 

***

 

Dredd ducked through alleys for six or seven blocks, making as many turns as he could while staying out of sight of the larger roads. The few people he ran into kept their heads down, didn’t look directly at him, and stayed out of his way. 

 

He pulled the big man behind him. His gun was pressed to the man’s rib cage, but it wasn’t necessary: he was still too stunned to do more than stumble along where he was led. But that was wearing off fast; it wouldn’t be long before he would realize that he was not with his people and start fighting back. 

 

Luckily, he reached his destination: an abandoned office building, short by most of the city’s standards. It must have been twenty or so years old, slated for demolition. He kicked in the door and pulled the man in behind him. He found a room with a view of the front door and a window through which he could see the lane beyond. 

 

He threw the man to the ground and aimed his gun at him. 

 

“What…” the man said, shaking his head back and forth. “What…”

 

“You were stunned,” Dredd said shortly. “You’re coming out of it. I’m a Judge.”

 

The man looked up sharply, shifting his body as if to try to spring to his feet. Dredd raised the gun higher. 

 

“Don’t,” he said. “I have some questions for you.”

 

“I can’t answer them,” the man said without hesitation. 

 

“Do you work for the Stitch Maker?” Dredd asked.

 

The man, true to his word, said nothing, at least not verbally. But as carefully and skillfully as he handled himself during a fight, he had clearly not been trained to keep his face still. His eyes widened and skittered away from Dredd’s, then back, and his shoulders tensed. 

 

“That’s a yes, then,” Dredd said. “You don’t look like you have any mechanical parts.”

 

“I don’t,” the man said sullenly. 

 

“Tell me about the mark on your head,” Dredd said. 

 

Instantly, he knew he’d misjudged the situation. The man’s reaction took him by surprise. He made a wild, panicked, animal sound of terror and flung himself to his feet with alarming grace, smoothly turning the motion into a leap toward Dredd, his hands outstretched as if to grab Dredd’s gun, or his throat. 

 

The man collided heavily with Dredd and he felt himself coming off his feet. Dredd did the only thing he could do, what the man must have known he would do. He angled the gun as well as he could under the circumstances and pulled the trigger. 

 

The man jerked and gasped, and then they hit the ground. Dredd landed on his back and the breath left his body in a rush, the man heavy on top of him, unmoving. Dredd shoved him off and aimed a kick at the man’s knee as he rolled away and back to his feet. 

 

The kick turned out not to be necessary. The man lay on his side, one hand flat and motionless on the ground, the other cupped around a wound in his chest. 

 

Dredd took in the man’s pallor, his glassy eyes, the amount and shade of the blood, and grimaced. He’d angled his shot too well; he’d nicked the heart, and there were only a few seconds left. 

 

He knelt beside the man, turning the man’s face up to look at him. 

 

“I can help you,” he lied. “Just tell me where the Stitch Maker is.”

 

The man flinched at the Stitch Maker’s name. “Please don’t tell,” he whispered through slack lips. “Please don’t tell the Stitch Maker I failed…”

 

“Where is he?” Dredd asked again, but it was too late. The man was still and his eyes were empty. 

 

Dredd stood and stepped away from the man’s body. Limp on the ground, the man looked much less like a dangerous fighter, much less like someone trained to kill. He was younger than Dredd, perhaps not even much older than Anderson. Dredd looked at him and felt grimness spread through him. 

 

_No. No time_. He would have felt something about the man’s body, about the blood, about the terror the man had felt at the mention of the Stitch Maker, if he had let himself feel anything about the situation at all. But he didn’t have the time. 

 

He closed the man’s eyelids and used his helmet visor to take a picture of the man’s face, trying to keep as much of the blood out of the shot as possible, trying not to make it obvious that he was violently dead. He would have to show the picture to Ma-Ma’s technician. 

 

Then he searched the man’s pockets and found his phone. It was password protected; he could deal with it later. He slipped it into his pocket.

 

He didn’t look back at the man he had killed as he made his way back out of the building. He had to figure out a way to get to the apartment, to Anderson without being followed or showing up on the cameras.

 

Luckily, he knew his piece of the city well enough.

 

***

 

Anderson hadn’t been able to sleep again, and Techie had been too focused on working to talk. By the time the door to the apartment swung open, she was so keyed up from being alone with her thoughts that she was on her feet, her hand inching toward her sidearm, at the first sound of the door unlocking. 

 

When she saw it was Dredd, she was so relieved that she smiled. He did not smile back.

 

“You survived the trap,” she said. 

 

“I did,” Dredd said, his voice seeming to grind against his vocal chords. “But I failed to get usable information.” Anderson didn’t miss the slight emphasis on the word _failed_. She started to feel something she never thought was possible with her stern, unfeeling superior: concern.

 

“What happened?”

 

Dredd described the trap, the fight, and the men with blue tattoos. Techie stared at the picture Dredd showed him, of the man he had questioned, for a very long time, and though he said he’d never seen the man before, he was clearly distressed and confused.

 

When Dredd was finished, Anderson took her turn and told him about the Chief Judge’s call and what she had uncovered about the Stitch Maker.

 

He seemed to get impossibly stiffer as she spoke, his body winding so tight he looked like he was about to snap like a rubber band. His face, what she could see of it under the helmet, was no longer frowning or scowling or grimacing; it was frozen and blank. His fists were clenched at his sides so tightly they shook slightly with the strain.

 

“Sir,” she started, and remembered that she was a Judge now, too. “Judge Dredd. Something about the Chief Judge’s call is bothering you. If it’s relevant to the case, you should tell me.”

 

Dredd didn’t answer at first, which worried her even more. Her impression of him was that, taciturn or not, he was not the type of man to lack for words when he needed them. 

 

“Judge Dredd,” she said again, “this isn’t a safe house registered to the Hall of Justice. What is this place?”

 

Dredd didn’t look away from her, or at least his visor didn’t move. “It’s mine,” he rasped, his voice even more strained than before.

 

“You have an assigned apartment,” Anderson said. “In the Judges’ block.”

 

He didn’t move, might as well have been made of stone but for his voice. “You can save enough, with a senior Judge’s pay, to get something small. Out of the way. This is mine.” He turned sharply and walked away from her, almost reaching for the door of the refrigerator, changing his mind and standing over the sink. He was aimless, she realized, despite the taut line of his shoulders. “It _was_ mine. But the Chief Judge knew all along.”

 

Anderson thought of Techie’s desperate desire for her not to go into his mind again. The last place he had that belonged entirely to him. In all her training to be a Judge, she’d never stopped to think that she might someday feel a similar need, for something that belonged to her alone and that her world couldn’t penetrate into.

 

Now she understood why the Chief Judge had apologized. She’d taken something from Dredd that he had valued.

 

She thought about saying that she was sorry, too. _What good would it do?_ she thought. _At the end of the day, we’re still Judges. This is just what it is_.

 

“We still have a job to do,” Dredd said, echoing her thoughts. “We have to find the Stitch Maker, and…” Dredd cut off when Techie abruptly rose to his feet.

 

“Judge Anderson,” Techie said in a very, very small voice. “Um… Judge D-Dredd.” Anderson turned to look at him. He was holding onto the tablet in one white-knuckled hand and he couldn’t quite meet her eyes, staring instead at the space just next to her head, eyes wide. 

 

“What is it?” she asked. 

 

“I… I have to tell you something,” he said, his shoulders curling in.

 

“What?”

 

“I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I lied to you.”

 

Anderson and Dredd both tensed at the same time. Techie flinched at the motion, ducking his head uselessly. When nothing happened for a moment, he looked back at her. 

 

“What did you lie to us about?” she asked evenly. 

 

“About… about the people who attacked me, in the alley. Before you… well, you rescued me. They did say something. They said I was one of the Stitch Maker’s blanks. They said they could tell because of the, of the tattoo. I didn’t know what that meant.”

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Anderson asked. 

 

“Because it didn’t make sense!” Techie said, twisting his free hand in his shirt, his voice cracking with distress. “It didn’t make any sense! I only met the Stitch Maker once! I know it was only once, with my eyes, and I’ve always been Ma-Ma’s, and it can’t… I couldn’t have forgotten… I swear it was only once. I’m not a blank. I don’t know what a blank is.”

 

His voice broke and he drew in a choking breath, and Anderson realized that he was crying, just without the ability to form tears. “I would have remembered,” he said miserably. 

 

“And you’re telling us now because there’s someone else with that mark,” Dredd said. His voice was surprisingly neutral, only a tiny touch of his regular growl. It was still enough to make Techie flinch. 

 

“It’s not just him,” Techie said, and held up the tablet almost like a shield. “There’s, um, I found something, a transaction. Between Ma-Ma and the Stitch Maker. I think, I think I’ve traced the length of their Slo-Mo partnership. They started working together on Slo-Mo three years ago. But their first transaction was four years ago.”

 

He handed Anderson the tablet. There were two transactions. Both were marked, not with a coded designation, but with the word “Blank.”

 

The first “Blank” was dated about six months before the second. It was also marked “Liquidated.”

 

“Caleb, um, you know, Ma-Ma’s second-in-command?” Techie said, twisting his hands together. “He always told me that, that, there was another Techie. Before me. But she didn’t work out. So I should work harder so I wouldn’t end up like her.” He pitched forward suddenly, nearly losing his balance before he caught himself, and put his head in his hands. “It was me,” he said, his voice shaking. “The second one. That was me.”

 

“Human trafficking,” Dredd said, sounding disgusted. 

 

Anderson had seen terrible, terrible things in Peach Trees, and even before. She’d grown up watching her neighbors get gunned down or disappear into vaguely discussed prostitution rings or gangs. She had killed, she had faced down people who wanted to kill her. She had even been inside Techie’s head, watching him be threatened and tormented and mutilated and terrified. She had known, of course, that he probably hadn’t chosen his life with the Ma-Ma Clan. 

 

But it was different, somehow, seeing it written, just a line item in a ledger, the simple purchase that was in so much contrast with the actual human being standing in front of her, trembling and crying. 

 

She set the tablet down on the kitchen counter and stepped a bit closer to Techie, resting her hand on his shoulder, trying not to crowd him. 

 

To her surprise, Dredd, without a word, reached into a cupboard and pulled out a glass, filled it with water, and set it on the table next to where Techie was standing. “Drink that,” he said, gruffly. 

 

Techie looked up between his fingers, glancing from Dredd to Anderson and back again, then reached out a wobbly hand and picked up the water. He drained the glass and, perhaps without even realizing it, leaned slightly against Anderson’s hand. 

 

Anderson looked up and stared into Dredd’s visor. “We have to know more,” Dredd said quietly.

 

Anderson sighed and nodded. She squeezed Techie’s shoulder gently. “Techie,” she said, “I have to do something you won’t like.”

 

He looked up at her, sniffling a bit. “You have to go into my mind.”

 

“I do. I’m sorry. I need to know everything, even the things you aren’t aware you know.”

 

Techie looked into the empty glass sadly. “I understand. I… I thought you’d need… Can we do it now?” He set his shoulders suddenly. “Just to get it over with?”

 

Anderson smiled at him. “Yes, we can.” She took a breath; somehow she was more nervous about this than she ever had been, taking the plunge into someone’s mind. “Here we go.”

 

She imagined a room, empty and softly lit, and nudged her imagination forward until it bumped against his mind, gently merging them. She reached out for his consciousness and drew it into the room she had imagined. 

 

He looked around. “What is this? My brain?”

 

“Almost,” she said, and gestured over his shoulder, where she called a door into being.

 

He glanced at the door, back at her, his face questioning.

 

“You can choose,” she said. “I can try to put up a barrier, so you won’t know what I’m doing and you don’t have to relive any of the memories I’m looking at. Or you can come with me and keep an eye one what I’m doing. You can help me. It _is_ your mind, after all.”

 

He thought about it for a a minute, and she held still, wanting to avoid rushing him. Finally he nodded and said, “I’ll come with you.”

 

She held out a hand to him, and his face lightened, a bit of the sick dread leaving him. He took her hand to lead her toward the door.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for Techie's terrible memories of non-consensual medical procedures.
> 
> I can't believe my ridiculous Italian-American ass managed to write a chapter without mentioning food. This chapter gave me a ton of trouble, so I hope it came out okay! I so appreciate everyone who's been reading.

"Is this…” Techie asked hesitantly. “Is this my mind?”

 

“Kind of,” Anderson answered. Through the door they’d found a vast black emptiness, waiting for Anderson to try to shape it into something that both she and Techie could travel through. She wasn’t very used to bringing a representation of the person themselves around with her; the last time she’d done this, back in Peach Trees, she _had_ intended it to hurt, or at least be unpleasant. She didn’t want that this time.

 

She was also finding that Techie’s brain was a bit disorienting. It wasn’t that his thoughts flitted, like the thoughts of someone who couldn’t focus; it was more that they moved at weird diagonals, changing direction, ducking around and backtracking from parts of his memories that he didn’t want to revisit, things that distressed him. It was a bit like standing on a subway train as it stopped and started; she kept having to do the mental equivalent of planting her feet and regaining her balance.

 

If it were anyone else, she would just try to bull through it, go as quickly and by as straight a route as possible to the memories she wanted. 

 

Instead she squeezed Techie’s hand, still held in her own. His form was blurring around the edges; she really hadn’t done things this way very often. 

 

“Techie,” she said, deciding to start with what would probably be the _least_ horrifying thing she would ask him to remember. “Can you think about the people who attacked you in the alley?”

 

Techie took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded. “Yeah, um, okay.” He closed his eyes and everything around them jolted, juddered, shifted, and Anderson had the sensation of being hungry, in pain, unable to see clearly, and utterly terrified. 

 

Unconsciously, she threw up the protective distance that she used to keep herself from being too sucked into other people’s memories. At the sound of a whimper beside her that was not from a memory, she tried to extend it like a blanket to cover Techie, as well.

 

She accompanied Techie through the memory of the attack in the alley, hearing and seeing all that he had, and was absurdly touched at the leap of hope that he remembered sweeping through him when she and Dredd had crashed the party. 

 

But that was the least of what she’d come here for. “Can you take me farther back?” she asked him.

 

“To… to my eyes?” he asked. She nodded. She wished she didn’t have to. She laced her fingers through his. 

 

For a brief second, they were in an entirely different memory, a warm, close space, a pile of blankets behind a server that hummed and gave of heat. She felt the echo of it against her back, the peace of knowing she’d been given a few hours alone to sleep, until she was needed again. She didn’t look around too much, let Techie have his privacy as he fortified himself with the more pleasant memory. 

 

Then, they stepped together into utter horror. 

 

Anderson tried to ignore the agony, the fear, the feeling of having machines inside her head and pulling at her flesh. Instead, she focused on what she could hear, on the sound of the Stitch Maker’s footsteps, on the number of other people she could hear moving around. 

 

Ma-Ma had brought Caleb and one other man with her, to drag Techie. There they were, Anderson thought, pinpointing their shifting, their scuffed steps. 

 

And there was no one else. The Stitch Maker had come to this meeting with no guards, no muscle, not even an assistant. He had been unafraid, or at the very least uncaring about his own safety. 

 

In the memory, unconsciousness rocketed closer. Anderson strained to hear any last bit of information that could help her.

 

“Why the eyes?” the Stitch Maker asked. His voice was distorted, but higher than Anderson had expected. She wasn’t sure whether it was an effect of the voice modifier or just the way the Stitch Maker talked, but his voice was completely flat. He didn’t even sound as if he was rushing or stressed about performing such a major surgery. 

 

“Do I need a reason?” Ma-Ma answered, her voice soft and slightly sarcastic. 

 

If the Stitch Maker answered, Techie was already too deep into unconsciousness to hear. 

 

Techie was shaking now, and was leaning heavily against her. Even with the distance she’d created between them and the feeling of the memories, she couldn’t imagine what it felt like to experience it playing out in front of him again. She squeezed his hand. “It’s okay, Techie,” she said. “Do you need a break?”

 

“That was it, right?” he asked miserably. “That was what you needed to see?”

 

“There’s one more thing,” she said, hating it even as she said it. “I want… I need to go back to the beginning of your memories. I need to see if you’ve met the Stitch Maker before.”

 

“Oh,” Techie said, and hunched his shoulders. 

 

“We can take some time, if you need to,” Anderson said, feeling helpless. “Or, if you want, I can… Try to keep you from seeing what I’m doing.”

 

Techie shook his head, and for a moment Anderson saw a hint of stubbornness and will under the layers of fear and hurt. “No, I’ll… I said I’d go with you, and I will. Let’s just do it now. Let’s just get it over with. If that’s okay.”

 

“Okay. Okay. Thank you, Techie.”

 

Anderson drew him with her as she skimmed back and back and back, getting just a few glimpses of the years, each memory like something looming out of a fog of pain. As she went, she noticed the strange feeling she’d picked up the first time she’d been in her mind, the brittleness, the instability, the lack of depth. His memories weren’t built the same way other people’s were.

 

And then the memories just… stopped. She came to the end and crashed into nothingness, as if she’d found a flat mirror where she’d expected another room, another hallway, another _space_. His memories weren’t built the same way because they weren’t built _on_ something. 

 

During her training with the Hall of Justice, she’d worked with people who had suffered amnesia, as a result of trauma or brain damage. The links had been there, broken or wounded but still existent. There was a lot of information that could be drawn from those minds, even without their owners being aware of it. 

 

This was different. She’d never felt anything like this before, and it scared her. 

 

“See?” Techie said, sounding desolate. “I told you. I forgot.”

 

Anderson traced the edges of the emptiness, looking for the earliest memory she could find. It was misty, so shaken and staticky it was barely decipherable, but it was there. She used every effort she could to clarify it, to bring it into some kind of focus that she could understand.

 

It started to resolve itself, and she started to realize where she was. She was in another room, like the one where Techie’s eyes had been installed, but she could see this time. 

 

And next to her, Techie jerked as if he’d been electrocuted, and whimpered. 

 

“No,” he whispered. “No, no, no, please, no. I don’t like this.”

 

“What is it?” she asked, torn between trying to help him, to pull him away from whatever this memory was, and trying to see what was going on. 

 

“No, this is, this is, we have to go, help me, help me,” he trailed off, trembling and making high-pitched sounds that he didn’t even seem to be aware of.

 

Anderson hesitated. She could hear footsteps, could see the figures in the room begin to resolve themselves into people, machinery. She could feel Techie’s remembered emotions beginning to bleed through. She was so close, there was so much that she could learn…

 

Techie seemed as though his mental projection’s legs were about to give out. This was becoming as violent as an interrogation, and with a wrench of failure she realized that she couldn’t allow it to continue. 

 

She took Techie’s arm and started to move back, away from the memory, and everything in front of her, the sights and the sounds and the emotions, became more and more muted. 

 

“Wait,” Techie said, pulling against her hold. He was still shaking, dreadfully pale, but his jaw was set, teeth clenched, eyes staring straight ahead. “Wait, this… This is where I came from.”

 

“Yes,” Anderson said, carefully. “This is the first thing that happened to you after you lost your memory.”

 

“This,” Techie said, and his voice had an edge, a hint of venom. “I have to see this.”

 

“Are you sure?”

 

“Yes. I want to know why…” He didn’t finish the thought, just tugged at her, trying to move back toward the memory. 

 

As they approached, the memory came into focus again, as if she was adjusting an old camera. Confusion and fear and a tremendous, shapeless sense of loss bounced and echoed off the memory, fracturing out from the past version of Techie into the modern one, and into Anderson. Techie was leaning on her by now, his knees trembling, and she was having trouble, too. But they were so close to real answers…

 

And then, abruptly, as if they’d broken through a frosted glass wall, everything was clear. An enormous room, full of hulking machinery, wires, tubes, IV drips, computers, and at the center, standing directly in front of Techie’s still organic eyes, the Stitch Maker himself. 

 

Techie was at an angle, back against a hard, cold table and the feeling of restraints on his wrists, and he was very obviously emerging from a haze of drugged unconsciousness. Through his vision, the room swam a bit, so Anderson wasn’t sure how tall or broad the Stitch Maker was, but he seemed smaller than the stature he’d taken on in Anderson’s imagination. He was dressed head to toe in hazmat scrubs, a hood over his head and a heavy mask over his face, bulky with what Anderson assumed was the voice modifier and an air filter and complete with black glass goggles over the eyes. It was impossible to make out any distinguishing features of the man.

 

The Stitch Maker stood over Techie, looking down at him, completely unmoving. Behind him, a computer chimed an alert. The Stitch Maker turned and walked to it, his movements steady and unhurried and graceful. He bent over the computer and tapped a few keys, staring at the screen. 

 

“He’s coming back,” the Stitch Maker murmured to himself, his voice mechanical through the modifier. “Brain function is stable. Semantic memory is still functioning, looks like. I’d say the wipe was successful.”

 

The Stitch Maker gestured to someone outside of Techie’s line of sight, and a moment later, an enormous man lumbered into view. He looked like he could pick either Anderson or Techie up and throw them. He also had a blurred, scrawled blue tattoo on his forehead. 

 

“Take Ma-Ma’s purchase to the drop point,” the Stitch Maker said. “Quickly, before the drugs wear off and he becomes aware of what’s around him. And tell Ma-Ma, please, that each wipe has a 27% chance of completely destroying all cognitive function, so she might think twice about eliminating another one.”

 

The man nodded and stepped to Techie’s side, unbuckling him from his restraints and dragging him bodily off the table and to his feet. In his memory, Techie stumbled, his heart rate spiking in his bewildered fear, and beside her, present-day Techie made a sound of distress.

 

The man put a hand on the back of Techie’s neck, shoving him through a series of doorways and halls and yanking him back up painfully whenever he tripped. At one point, they passed a military-grade blast door that Anderson knew was illegal to install in a civilian building. It looked like it could withstand a truck full of explosives. After the blast door came a staircase up, then an exterior door, and at last, they emerged into a street, the sky night-dark, and the man pushed Techie toward a car. 

 

Desperately, Anderson tried to take in everything around her, every building, every light, every little thing that could act as a landmark. She started to despair when Techie, in the memory, turned his eyes to the ground, blinking against the drugged slowness of his mind. Anderson stared at the pavement with him, tense and hoping, hoping…

 

And then, just as Techie was heaved into the back of the car, he lifted his head and looked all around him. Anderson seized the image, determined to bring it with her back into her own mind, and squeezed Techie’s arm. “Good job,” she whispered. “You did it. You did it.”

 

The car ride was short but the windows were blacked out. When the car finally stopped, it was in an underground car park, and Caleb was waiting for them with two guards. When the enormous man, in a flat, emotionless voice, conveyed the Stitch Maker’s message, Caleb just laughed. “Sure, I’ll let Ma-Ma know.” Then it was back into another car. As the drugs wore off, Techie’s sense of loss dissipated, his understanding of what had been taken from him receding into apathy as his fear and panic grew.

 

And when the door of the car opened again, and Techie was hauled out again, they were in front of Peach Trees. The few people around didn’t bother to look up at them as they passed, and when Techie opened his mouth to say something, call for help, Caleb yanked on his arm so hard  that he stumbled and nearly fell, his shoulder joint burning with pain. 

 

“Don’t,” Caleb said in a low voice. “You really don’t want to do that.”

 

Techie was taken to the nearest staircase, his strength already flagging and his head spinning, then to the upper floors and deposited in the server room. 

 

And Anderson knew, with the certainty with which Techie knew, that he would not leave the block again, would not even leave the upper floors of the block, until years later. Until Dredd and Anderson had come to Peach Trees.

 

***

 

Judge Anderson drew them out slowly, carefully, gently, but Techie was barely aware of it, just following along as best he could. In the world outside Techie’s head, Anderson’s hand was still on his shoulder. He blinked his eyes open. They hurt again. A lot of things hurt, actually, like he’d been tensed up for a long time. He should do something about that. He should…

 

Techie lurched away from Anderson and managed to make it back to the couch before his legs gave out. He fell against the cushions, all his movements jerky and uncoordinated. He didn’t seem to be able to control his body. He didn’t think he was having the right emotional reaction to that fact. He wasn’t sure he was having any reaction at all. 

 

“How long were we… gone?” he heard Anderson saying. She sounded tired.

 

“A minute or so,” Dredd answered in his usual growl. “I expected it to take longer.”

 

“A mind isn’t the same as the real world,” Anderson said. “Things work differently there. Techie? Techie, are you alright?”

 

Techie should answer her, probably. Techie was shaking, and that was strange. His pulse was racing, but he wasn’t afraid. 

 

Anderson was kneeling in front of him. “Techie, are you okay?”

 

Something was prickling along the back of his neck. His breath was coming short. Techie was… oh, there it was. Techie was afraid. 

 

“Techie, I think you’re in shock.”

 

The fear just kept building and building. Their voices sounded like they were coming from far away. 

 

Someone was holding his hand, someone with small, delicate fingers. He held back like it was the only thing keeping him alive. He tried to focus on the way he was breathing, trying to even it out, get back some kind of control.

 

Finally, finally, he felt the world resolve itself. Anderson was sitting next to him, not close enough to crowd him, but close enough to hold onto his hand. Dredd was leaning against the wall close by, arms crossed, tense and alert, as if he was waiting to see if they needed him. 

 

A tidal wave of emotion crashed over him, stronger even than the horror of having to relive those terrible memories. The Judges weren’t like anyone else. They hadn’t hurt him; they’d done something like the opposite, whatever that was. He would have done absolutely anything they asked, in that moment. He couldn’t understand it, let alone put a name to it. 

 

“Did we…” He had to swallow past the lump in his throat. “Did we get what you needed? Did we find out…?”

 

“We did,” Anderson said, smiling at him. “We did, thanks to you. Thank you, Techie.” His heart leaped with something that wasn’t fear. 

 

Dredd turned his visor toward Techie and nodded, saying, “Good work.” Techie worried for a brief moment that he was going to faint. 

 

“What did you get?” Dredd asked, to Anderson this time.

 

“A location,” Anderson replied. “Nothing definite, but enough to go with. I can compare the memory with camera images. It’ll take some time, but it’s something.”

 

“How do we know the Stitch Maker hasn’t moved on from that location?” Dredd asked. 

 

“The machines,” Techie murmured.

 

“He’s right,” Anderson said. “The medical machinery he was using to… process memory was enormous. It would be difficult to move.”

 

“The power it was using,” Techie chimed in, still reeling and emboldened from the rush of feelings. “It would be hard to find a place where he could draw that much power. Or to modify an existing grid. Once he had a place for that, why… Why leave? Without a good reason.”

 

Dredd nodded. “Then we have a place to start.”

 

“There’s… There’s something else,” Anderson said, hesitantly. When Techie glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, he saw that she was looking at him, not at Dredd.

 

_Oh, no_ , he thought. That was all they had needed him for. They were going to tell him to leave. _Please don’t_ , he thought. _I can still be useful_. He didn’t say anything, though; his throat was too tight to get the words out. He just nodded.

 

“It’s about your memory,” Anderson continued. “It’s gone. Entirely.”

 

“I know,” Techie said, not really knowing what she was getting at.

 

“No, it’s gone. Memory loss doesn’t, it doesn’t work like that, usually. I’ve seen the insides of a lot of people’s minds, and people… They’re built on their memories, even if they can’t consciously access them.”

 

“Okay,” Techie said, getting more nervous as he failed to follow her point.

 

Anderson squeezed his hand. “Techie, I want to tell you this because I feel like you have a right to know. There’s no way to get to your memories, because they don’t exist anymore. Without your memories, with your memories erased the way they were… The person you were, whoever you were, before that… He’s gone. It’s like he’s dead. Whoever you were before, you’re not that person now. I’m not trying to hurt you by saying that. I just… I feel like you deserve to know this about yourself.”

 

She was looking at him with sympathy and concern. She expected a reaction, he realized. She expected him to feel something about what she’d told him.

 

Did he feel something?

 

He’d been curious sometimes, he thought. About his memories, who he’d been before. But every time he tried to reach back, unearth something, he found numbness, like when he’d accidentally sat on his feet and let them fall asleep. And he’d had more on his mind than just who he was or where he’d come from. He’d had to think about survival, staying on Ma-Ma’s good side. He’d never really had the time, the patience, or the inclination to think too hard about his lack of memory.

 

“I… okay,” he said, carefully, not really knowing what else to say, or what exactly to feel. “That’s… Thank you for telling me that.”

 

Anderson smiled a little sadly at him. 

 

***

 

The plan they came up with was simple and completely, utterly tedious. 

 

Dredd unearthed an old, spare tablet from the bedroom, connected it to the Hall of Justice system, and gave it to Anderson, setting her up at one end of the sofa to go through camera feeds from every angle they could get. Anderson didn’t point out to Dredd what he must already know: connecting the tablet to the Judges’ system would put the tablet on the radar, and he’d never be able to use it again without the Hall of Justice logging its activity. 

 

Anderson also didn’t suggest that Techie help her go through the footage, because his job was to use the other tablet to scour Ma-Ma’s records, as well as his own memory, and come up with as many as possible of the drop points and meeting spots that Ma-Ma had used to communicate with the Stitch Maker. 

 

Dredd himself, after giving everyone their assignments, vanished out the door, having not for a moment removed his armor or even his helmet, and returned some while later with a nondescript, scuffed case. Then he left again, and came back again with another case, then left again and brought back another, and another, until there were four small boxes. 

 

“What are those?” Anderson asked, looking up from her screen with her eyes feeling grainy and aching. She glanced over at Techie, whose attention didn’t seem to have changed over the hours; apparently mechanical eyes didn’t get tired in the same way. 

 

“I raided some Hall of Justice stockpiles,” Dredd answered nonchalantly. 

 

Anderson blinked. “I thought those were just stories that cadets told each other. There really are stockpiles?” It was a good story, really: the Hall of Justice had set up stockpiles of weapons and ammo all over the city, so that Judges who had been cut off from backup still had a chance of getting an edge over their assailants. But they were supposed to be a secret that was given to Judges as needed.

 

Dredd nodded. “But access to them is protected. Opening them alerts the Chief Judge.”

 

“So she knows that we’re planning something. That we’re about to make a move. We get some supplies and manage to send a message to the Chief Judge.”

 

Dredd nodded, his scowl becoming more pronounced. “But if anyone’s penetrated her security, they know too. I tried to avoid the nearest stockpiles, but it’s still a risk.”

 

Anderson nodded and turned her attention back to her screen. “Understood. I…” She flipped to the next image, then paused, her tired brain snapping back into gear. She flipped back to the previous image again. “Oh,” she said, her voice almost awed. 

 

Dredd tensed, and even Techie looked up. “Find it?” Dredd asked.

 

“Techie, look,” Anderson said, tilting her screen toward him. He looked at it, the irises of his mechanical eyes focusing, unfocusing, refocusing. 

 

“That’s it,” Techie said softly. “That’s it. That’s the place we saw.”

 

Phase one of the plan was done. Phase two was going to involve violence.

 

***

 

“You don’t have to come with us,” Dredd said. Techie had started out referring to him in his head as “the scary Judge,” but now, he realized, he just thought of him as Dredd. Dredd and Anderson, the people who asked instead of ordered, the people who comforted instead of hurt. 

 

His mind was made up. “You might need me,” Techie said stubbornly. “I’m good at what I do, you might need someone to deal with computers or machinery.”

 

Techie had been on the verge of being left behind anyway, but he’d managed to spot an Icebreaker kit in one of the stockpiles. The kit, when plugged in to a computer system, would send a wave of attacks to overwhelm the security and allow someone who knew how to use it to break through. He’d learned how to use one while working for Ma-Ma, and he held tightly to the Icebreaker box and its attached length of cord, holding them in front of him as a proof of his usefulness.

 

Dredd nodded. “Okay. But you’ll need shoes.” He went into the bedroom and came back with a pair of boots that were almost as thick and heavy as the armored boots that he and Anderson were wearing. 

 

They were a bit too small for him (Techie had a tall man’s absurdly oversized feet), but they’d do. He’d had a pair of shoes, once, a few years ago, that he’d worn until he’d worn them out, and no one had bothered to replace them. It was comforting to have shoes again. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about stepping on anything sharp. 

 

“And this,” Dredd said, shoving a leather jacket into Techie’s arms. “It’s night. Scrubs aren’t very warm.” Dredd turned and stumped away to one of the boxes of weapons, not staying to see Techie’s reaction. 

 

Techie put the jacket on. It was like wearing a blanket, only it didn’t restrict his movement. On an intellectual level, he knew that a bullet or a good knife would go right through the jacket, but it still made him feel absurdly protected. He tucked the Icebreaker into an inner pocket.

 

“Are you ready?” Anderson asked, gesturing toward the table where he’d left the tablet he’d been working on. 

 

Techie nodded, picked the tablet up, read his code over one more time, and initiated the process. 

 

Techie had written a script that used Dredd’s account to flag criminal activity at each of the drop and meeting places that Techie had found in Ma-Ma’s records, all at the same time. Judges could, of course, choose which calls they would respond to, given that there was too much crime for them to respond to every call. But they were hoping that the Chief Judge would prioritize these calls, since they came from Dredd’s account and since they had already signaled her, through the emptying of the stockpiles, that they were up to something. 

 

And besides, even if they knew it was probably a distraction, the corrupt Judges within the Hall of Justice, if they were able to respond to the calls, would probably pick them up just to cover their trails and make sure no one else looked too closely at those locations. And with the corrupt Judges tied up and attention focused elsewhere, the Stitch Maker would be unprepared and unsupported for their run on the memory lab.

 

At least, that was the hope.

 

“Okay,” Techie said. “You’re good to go.” He flashed Dredd a thumbs-up, impulsively, and then immediately regretted it. He probably looked like such an idiot. 

 

Dredd just nodded and looped a gun belt and bandolier over his armor, filling both up with weapons and ammunition.

 

“Will… Will you need that much?” Techie asked, eyes wide.

 

“Ran out of bullets in Peach Trees,” Dredd said. “I don’t intend to do that again.”

 

“Oh,” Techie said, glancing into one of the boxes. He didn’t even recognize half of the things in there. 

 

“You’ll need to look out for yourself,” Dredd told him sternly.

 

“Of course, I will!” Techie said quickly. “I’ll find a place to hide as soon as the shooting starts.”

 

Techie didn’t really like riding on the back of Anderson’s motorcycle; if he was being honest, it was terrifying. But he trusted her, so he just held on and closed his eyes. 

 

They stopped and concealed the motorcycles several blocks away, then continued on foot. Techie felt himself tensing up more and more as they went. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Dredd held up an arm to stop Techie and Anderson.  

 

“What is it?” Anderson whispered.

 

“There,” Dredd said, and pointed. “Camera.” Techie strained to see what he was pointing at, even with his mechanically enhanced eyes. When he saw it, he couldn’t believe that Dredd had spotted it. It was a small, dark bulge way up high on the side of a building, pointing down at the street below.

 

“Do you think we’re in its line of sight?” Anderson asked.

 

Dredd shook his head. “Doubt it. I think we’re far enough away. I can hit it.” Dredd gently touched his fingertips to his sidearm. “It will let them know what direction we’re coming from, but they won’t know how many of us there are, or how we’re armed.”

 

“Let me,” Techie said. 

 

“What?” Anderson asked, looking startled. 

 

Techie swallowed hard, trying not to show how nervous he was. “I… I’ve worked with cameras like that before. Ma-Ma had similar ones set up all over Peach Trees. And when they broke, she brought them to me. So I know how they work. And they’re networked, so, so there’s probably more, around. If I can sneak up on one of them and get into it…”

 

“You can shut down the others,” Dredd finished for him. 

 

Techie nodded. “I can loop the video, for all of them that are on the network. They’ll probably figure it out pretty quickly, and they might have other cameras that aren’t on the network, maybe, but it’ll give us a chance.”

 

“At the very least, they might not know which direction we’re coming from,” Anderson said. 

 

“One thing,” Dredd said, pointing straight up. “How are we going to access it?”

 

“Well, that’s…” Techie took a steadying breath. “So, the thing is… If you can lower me down…”

 

Dredd and Anderson both stared at him. Or at least he assumed Dredd was staring at him. It was difficult to tell with the helmet. 

 

“You want us to,” Anderson said, speaking slowly, “suspend you head down four stories up while you fiddle with a camera?”

 

“I can do it,” Techie said, caught between a sudden, absurd desire to prove himself and absolute terror at what he was suggesting.

 

“Then we can do our part,” Dredd said.

 

Anderson shot him a look, but Dredd didn’t visibly respond. After a second, Anderson nodded and said, “Alright. Let’s go.”

 

They made their way up to the top of the building, and Techie looked over the lip of the roof with his heart pounding in his ears. It was about seven feet down, he thought. He’d have to stretch his arms. 

 

“Are you ready?” Anderson asked.

 

“Give me a second,” Techie said, pulling out the tablet and getting his code ready. “I’ve done things like this before. I know what I’m doing.” That wasn’t even an exaggeration; one of the first things he’d learned how to do was write code to loop video recording. It came in useful for someone like Ma-Ma.

 

When he had the code queued up and ready to go, Techie slid out of the leather coat, took the tablet and cord out of the inside pocket, and held them as tightly as he could. 

 

“Alright,” he said. He was grateful that neither of the Judges remarked on the way his voice broke. 

 

***

 

Anderson really, really didn’t like this plan. She’d noticed the change in Techie, since she’d dug up his memories. She wondered if anyone in the Ma-Ma Clan had ever treated him with kindness, or touched him without intending to hurt him. 

 

It had taken so little to win his obvious, self-sacrificing loyalty. At this point, she thought, he would do anything for them. Even as far as suggesting something tremendously dangerous. It was making her stomach churn with guilt as she and Dredd tied a length of grappling cord around his waist, secured the cord to the railing at the top of the fire escape, then took hold of his ankles and lifted him over the edge of the roof. If he got hurt, she would never be able to convince herself it wasn’t her fault.

 

She held on to Techie as tightly as she could, only loosening her grip when she felt his ankle bones digging into her palms and heard Techie made a soft, pained sound. 

 

“Sorry,” she said. 

 

“It’s okay,” she heard him say, his voice shaking. “Just… You don’t have to hold on so tight. But… But do hold on, though, please.” He giggled nervously, and Anderson felt her heart slam into her ribs. 

 

Dredd, beside her, seemed, at first glance, to be completely unfazed, but his hands and arms and back were so tense that she could have knocked him off balance easily from behind if she’d wanted to. 

 

Anderson looked over the edge of the roof at Techie. He was moving his arms very slowly, trying not to make his body swing or pivot. He had his stomach pressed to the brickwork, his arms outstretched, his neck craned at an odd angle so he could see what he was doing. 

 

Carefully, he felt with one hand along the top of the camera casing, digging in with his fingernails and pulling up a panel. Slowly, slowly, he unraveled the cords extending from either end of the Icebreaker and plugged one in to the camera and the other in to the tablet, tapping at the keys. 

 

Anderson’s hands were getting tired. She knew that she could probably trust the cord, but still wasn’t willing to let go. She tried to tighten and loosen her fingers as much as she dared. She could feel the tell-tale tingle of an oncoming cramp in the heel of one hand. 

 

Part of her wanted to call over the edge of the roof and ask Techie how he was doing, when he would be done, but she didn’t want to disturb his concentration. This couldn’t be comfortable for him, either. 

 

Beside her, Dredd was gritting his teeth. They were clicking and grinding with such intensity that it was audible to her, even over the ambient noise of the city. 

 

Techie sucked in a startled breath and twitched, making his entire body sway slightly and making Anderson reflexively tighten her grip on his ankle.

 

“What happened?” Dredd growled. 

 

“Um…” Techie’s voice was high, and sounded as if he was on the verge of hysteria. “Just… I thought there was going to be a problem, but, it’s, it’s okay. I didn’t trigger an alert, and, well, I’m not falling, and I’ve still got the tablet, so I’m not worried, no, I’m, I’m not worried…” His voice trailed off as he continued working, and neither Dredd nor Anderson asked him anything further. 

 

Anderson lost track of time, a little bit. She sunk into the pain in her hands and forearms, not trying to ignore it, just trying to ride over the top of it, control it. 

 

“I’m past the security,” Techie said, very quietly. 

 

“You are?” Anderson asked.

 

Techie didn’t nod, thankfully, just carefully tapped a final few keys on the tablet and stared at the screen intently. “Yes,” he said, his voice wavering on the edge of desperation. “Yes, it’s done, please, please pull me up.”

 

Anderson and Dredd leaned their bodies away from the edge of the roof, using their own weight to draw him back up and over the edge of the roof. When he had finally scrambled over the wall surrounding the edge, Anderson was almost unable to unbend her fingers and let go of him. 

 

“Are you okay?” Anderson asked him, helping him untie himself from his lifeline. 

 

His eyes were wide, but he nodded and even smiled slightly. He held up the tablet and its cord. “I held on to everything.” His hands were shaking, now that it was all over.

 

Impulsively, Anderson leaned over and hugged him. Even Dredd muttered, “Good work.” Between the two reactions, Techie looked completely dazed. 

 

“You did your part,” Anderson said. “You did great. Now we want you to stay up here, out of the fight.”

 

“Are you sure?” Techie asked, looking at her with a complicated expression that she wasn’t sure about.

 

“We won’t be long,” Dredd said darkly, his hands drifting toward his belt of weapons.

 

Anderson nodded. “We won’t. We’ll be back, Techie. We won’t leave you behind here. I promise.”

 

Techie nodded and pulled his borrowed coat back over his shoulders. 

 

Anderson and Dredd climbed back down the fire escape hugged the buildings at the edge of the street as they made their way toward the Stitch Maker’s memory lab. 

 

Anderson felt a prickling sense of being watched, even with the cameras out. There were still so many variables that she and Dredd didn’t know and couldn’t control. 

 

The front of the Stitch Maker’s building was nondescript, bland and rundown, but as they approached the recessed doorway, they saw that it was equipped with heavy-duty locks and a security camera setup that were far more impressive than the structure around them.

 

“I think this is the right place,” Anderson said. 

 

Dredd nodded. “Here we go.” He drew his weapon, selected the directional explosive bullets, and pumped two into the locking mechanism of the door. 

 

With a horrendous noise, the area around the lock was blasted inward, and a well-placed kick from Anderson knocked the broken door completely open. 

 

Beyond the door was a dim hallway, with stairs leading off it going up toward the higher levels of the building and down into the below-ground lab she’d seen in Techie’s memories. 

 

“That way,” she said to Dredd, motioning with her head, keeping her weapon up and trained in front of her. “We need to get there before they shut that blast door at the bottom of the stairs.”

 

He nodded, and they moved together toward the stairs leading down. “Eyes forward,” Dredd said. “I’ll take the back.” He turned so that he was moving sideways down the staircase, his gun pointed back the way they came. Anderson didn’t let her own gaze move from the path in front of them.

 

As they moved around a turn in the staircase, there was a sudden scuttling sound of movement. A person was rushing up the stairs toward them. “Ahead,” Anderson hissed, and stopped, waiting for the person to appear in her line of sight. 

 

The person appeared for just a moment, and Anderson had the briefest impression of a feminine face with a smear of blue across the forehead. She tensed, ready to squeeze the trigger, but the woman ducked away again, around a bend in the wall. 

 

“There’s,” Anderson began in a low voice.

 

The sound of running feet from behind them cut her off. 

 

“Hostiles above,” Dredd barked.  

 

“Hostiles below,” Anderson echoed him, but she turned and flattened herself to the wall, so she could point her gun in the same direction as Dredd while still minimizing her size as a target for the person she’d caught a glimpse of. 

 

The narrowness of the stairway worked in their advantage. The four people who appeared around the turn in the staircase above them weren’t able to spread out or surround them.

 

They also had blue on their foreheads. _How many of them are there?_ Anderson thought, almost in despair, and with a quick decision, she switched her gun to stun bullets and dropped two in quick succession. 

 

By the lack of blood on the other two assailants, she thought Dredd had done the same. It was not what she would have expected from him. After all, the penalty for attempted murder of a Judge was immediate execution.

 

“Let’s keep moving,” Dredd ground out, and Anderson nodded. They took up their positions again and resumed their quick but careful progress down the staircase.

 

There was the blast door at the bottom of the staircase, just as she’d seen it in Techie’s memory. She had expected it to be shut. They had certainly given the Stitch Maker, or whoever was in the laboratory below, enough time and enough noisy warning to shut themselves in. She had been thinking about the potential of their high explosive rounds to put a dent in blast door as they’d descended.

 

It apparently wouldn’t be necessary. The blast door was still open. And they weren’t alone.

 

The hallway beyond the blast door was empty, except for a single woman standing in plain view, the woman Anderson had seen on the stairs. She didn’t seem to be trying to hide herself or to prepare for any kind of fight. Her hands were at her sides and empty of weapons. She stared at them with wide eyes and an uncertain expression. She looked as if she was in her mid to late 30s, slender and not particularly tall, with her hair buzzed short and dark circles under her eyes. She stood with her shoulders rounded, as if she was trying to make herself look smaller than she was. 

 

She had a blue tattoo on her forehead, but it wasn’t scrawled or crammed into a small space. It was written in clear letters, crossing from one side of her forehead to the other, just above her eyes: BLANK. 

 

Anderson glanced at Dredd, who nodded. He kept his weapon up as she holstered hers and took a step forward, toward the woman. 

 

“Hello,” Anderson said, trying to sound reassuring, remembering the storm of terror whirling through Techie’s brain and imagining that the Stitch Maker would probably not be much better to his people than Ma-Ma was. “My name is Anderson.” 

 

“Okay, Anderson,” the woman said, so quietly that Anderson had to take another step forward to hear her. 

 

“We’re Judges,” Anderson continued. “We’re here for the Stitch Maker. Could you take me to him?” Anderson stepped forward again, over the lip of the blast door and into the inner section of the hallway. 

 

The woman glanced at where Anderson was standing, probably understanding as well as Anderson did that there was no way to shut her out now. Anderson was pleased that the woman didn’t look particularly scared about this. 

 

“What will you do when you find him?” the woman asked, tilting her head slightly to one side. 

 

Anderson hesitated. She had no idea how deep the woman’s loyalty to the Stitch Maker might run. “Nothing that will hurt you,” she settled on. “We’re going to take him to the Hall of Justice.”

 

A ghost of a smile played across the woman’s mouth. “Okay, Anderson,” she said again. “I’ll take you. Follow me.”

 

“Thank you,” Anderson said. 

 

The woman turned her back to them and began to walk. As she did, her shoulders straightened, probably unconsciously. Her walk was calm, careful, graceful… and familiar.   

 

It was the way she moved… It was impossible, but… Anderson drew her sidearm from its holster and then made the mistake of glancing away from the woman, toward where Dredd was still on the other side of the open blast door, ready to follow them. 

 

“It’s her!” Anderson shouted, and from the corner of her eye she saw the woman moving suddenly, eerily quickly. “She’s the Stitch Ma…” Two things cut her off. The first was the blast door irising shut with a loud _clang_. She heard Dredd shout and leap forward, but too late; he was trapped on the other side. The second was a bolt of lightning emanating through Anderson’s body from a white-hot point on the side of her head. 

 

As her vision cleared, she could feel that she was on her back on the ground, and that something was stuck to the side of her head. If she had to guess, she’d bet that it was a taser tag, but she couldn’t move to get it off. Her gun had fallen from her hand, and she saw the Stitch Maker saunter over and pick it up, with her other hand pocketing the remote that she’d used to close the door.

 

_How?_ Anderson thought, helpless and furious about it. _How? The Stitch Maker’s been active for decades, how is this possible?_

 

“Well hello there, Anderson,” the Stitch Maker said, her voice still quiet, still calm. Even without the voice modifier, Anderson thought she could recognize the emotionlessness from Techie’s memories. 

 

“Y…” Anderson said, trying to get her lips and tongue to cooperate. There was the sound of footsteps, two sets, the Stitch Maker’s reinforcements, she guessed.  

 

“Yes, it’s me,” the Stitch Maker replied. “You were being so nice to that tech I sold to Ma-Ma, I thought you’d like the poor helpless blank routine. So noble. Sorry about this, but…” The Stitch Maker knelt beside Anderson, pulling a capped hypodermic syringe from another pocket. Anderson struggled, exerting all her energy to try to move, but it was no good. She could move, just slightly, but she couldn’t coordinate those movements. 

 

The tip of the syringe dipped into Anderson’s neck. Whatever was in it worked fast; her vision began to swim and her thoughts slowed and slowed and slowed. 

 

“I am amazed that you were able to get this location out of that shivering wreck you’ve been carting around with you,” the Stitch Maker said, standing again and looking down at Anderson. “A psychic, or so I hear from my sources in the Hall of Justice. Very interesting. I was hoping not to deal with Judges just yet, or at least not Judges that weren’t on my payroll. But you know what they say, a stitch in time saves nine. Maybe I can nip this problem in the bud. And besides, I am _desperate_ to get a look at what’s in that brain of yours.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew! Finally done! Thank you so much to everyone who's been reading this for bearing with me. I appreciate the kudos and comments so much. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! (Also, I’m no neuroscientist, so I don’t know if the stuff in this chapter is even possible, but hey. There’s psychics, we’re already in the realm of fiction.)

The door irised shut so quickly that by the time Dredd got his gun up, he already didn’t have a shot at the Blank woman. The Stitch Maker herself. He immediately fired a directional explosive bullet into the blast door. It ran the risk of sending dangerous shrapnel toward Anderson on the other side, but he was sure he’d saw her fall. He’d just have to hope she was out of the line of fire. 

 

The bullet created an enormous noise, and even sent a few metal shavings skittering along the floor on Dredd’s side of the door, but when the smoke cleared, there was a burn mark and a scratch on the door, but nothing else. 

 

He pumped another round into the same spot, then another, then another and another and another, and kept going until his clip of explosive bullets was empty and his ears were ringing, even through the padding in his helmet. He was squeezing his gun so tightly that his hands ached and stabbing pain shot through the joints in his fingers. 

 

Anderson was there. Anderson was on the other side of that door. He’d brought her into this. He’d brought her here. And now she was on the other side of that door, on the ground and trapped with a murderous criminal, and he couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t _fix things_. 

 

He had to find another way in, or to get through this door. He had to do that as soon as possible. But, he realized suddenly, cursing himself for not thinking clearly, he had to secure the perimeter, as well.

 

There was no way that the Stitch Maker hadn’t immediately called for reinforcements. He had to assume that their distraction had been exposed, and every corrupt Judge in the district was on their way to eliminate him.

 

He wouldn’t be able to do this alone. 

 

Every part of him hated the idea of leaving the building, leaving Anderson behind. But he was no good to her waiting in front of the blast door to die. He had to move quickly.

 

***

 

Techie had come down from the roof of the building as soon as the Judges were out of sight. He was probably more conspicuous on ground level, but he’d spent all his life, all that he remembered, at the top of a building, and he didn’t really want to wait this whole thing out at the top of another one. 

 

He found a little sheltered corner in a recessed doorway, and he tucked himself into the small space, drawing his long legs up to his chest and wrapping Judge Dredd’s coat around them. He was a really terrible combination of anxious and bored. 

 

He wanted Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson to come back soon, safe and sound and having defeated the Stitch Maker and saved the day. 

 

And then what?

 

He hunched his shoulders, pulling the coat tighter around himself. _What, they’ll take you with them when they go do… Judge things?_ He wasn’t that stupid. They’d say thanks and send him on his way and that would be the last he’d see of them. How could it be any other way? He’d have to figure out how to take care of himself. 

 

He could think about that later. It was making him nauseous. He didn’t want to never see Anderson and Dredd again. He wanted them to come back safe and sound and say that they’d defeated the Stitch Maker once and for all, like at the end of an episode of a TV show, when the good guys always won. He could think then about what would come after; he just wanted them to be okay.

 

He cared about them. Maybe. He wasn’t really sure what caring about someone felt like. He wondered if he’d ever cared about anyone before. Or if that other him, before his memories were wiped, had. 

 

He had the sudden horrible thought that he might have had a family. Maybe parents or siblings or something. Friends? A wife or a husband, even? _They could have been in Peach Trees the whole time_ , he thought, and the idea made him give a low, whimpery sound and hunch deeper into the coat. He could have spent all those years up at the top of the block, never realizing that there were people below him who would have helped him. Who would have _wanted_ to help him, even if he wasn’t the same as the person they’d lost. He could have watched them on a security camera and not even known. 

 

This train of thought wasn’t making him feel any better.

 

He heard a few quiet footsteps and looked up with his heart in his throat to see Dredd coming around the corner, keeping low and moving with much less noise than Techie would have expected from those boots. Anderson wasn’t with him. Techie felt instantly awful. 

 

He levered himself to his feet, fists clenched in the leather of the jacket. “What is it?” he choked out.

 

Dredd held a finger to his lips and ducked into the doorway with him. “Need your help. Anderson’s been captured.”

 

“I… I… I don’t…” Techie felt so useless. He couldn’t stop thinking about his eyes, about the pain and the fear and the wrongness. Somehow Anderson being captured by the Stitch Maker was so much worse than Techie himself being in danger.

 

“We’ll fix it,” Dredd said firmly. “There’s a Hall of Justice connection terminal a block away. Can you use that Icebreaker to access it?”

 

“I think so,” Techie said, then changed his mind. “Yes, I can. Let’s go.”

 

Dredd led the way and Techie stumbled after him, skidding around corners and trying to keep his balance. He wasn’t used to running. 

 

Dredd pulled him to a stop and steadied him in front of the terminal, and Techie pulled the Icebreaker and tablet out of his coat pockets and got to work. 

 

“What do you need?” he asked.

 

“Can you get into the traffic control?” Dredd asked.

 

Techie scrolled through the code of the terminal, sliding effortlessly back into the concentration that had kept him alive in Peach Trees. “Hmmm,” he hummed, then said, “Yes, yes I can.”

 

“Okay. I need you to throw up as many traffic alerts as you can between here and the Hall of Justice. Say streets are closed, request roadblocks, suggest long detours, anything to create chaos.”

 

“You think that will stop any Judges on the Stitch Maker’s payroll?” Techie asked, immediately writing something simple to throw a wrench into the traffic control’s workings. 

 

“I think it might slow them down.”

 

“Okay, I’ve got something working. I could do something more complicated, but it will take time.”

 

“Don’t bother, we’ve got other things to do. Can you send a message to the Chief Judge?”

 

“I don’t think I can get it to her in any kind of secure form. Not from here.”

 

“It doesn’t need to be secure, not anymore. Just tell her where we are and that we have corrupt Judges incoming. Request backup.”

 

“Got it,” Techie said, fingers flying over the keys. “Done, sent.”

 

“Last thing,” Dredd said. “Do you think you could get through that blast door? Access its code and get it to open?”

 

“Um…” Techie didn’t want to tell Dredd bad news. Techie didn’t want to let Anderson down. Techie was restrained by the bounds of possibility. It was all a mess of contradictions. “It’s just, that’s where her strongest security software is going to be. It would take so much time… Wait a minute. Wait, I have an idea.”

 

From the Hall of Justice terminal, Techie was able to access the architectural records of this area of the city. He could feel Dredd becoming more impatient behind him as he rushed to find what he was looking for.

 

“There,” he muttered, pulling up the schematics of the Stitch Maker’s building. “I was thinking about that lab. It would need… Yes!” He pointed, and Dredd leaned over his shoulder to look at the screen.

 

“Is that a pipe?” the Judge asked.

 

“It’s a vent. It was part of the original building plan. I figured that a lab like that would have to have some kind of airflow, a way to get rid of heat from the machines or, um… smells from… the bodies. At Peach Trees, for the slo-mo assembly lab, Ma-Ma just found a room that was connected to a vent that was already in the building and installed security in the vent. I’m guessing that the Stitch Maker did the same thing with this. 

 

“What kind of security?” Dredd asked.

 

“A gate that closed over the opening and could be opened remotely. The one in Peach Trees had a simple script to open and close it. That would be way easier to break into than the blast door that everyone’s expecting me to try to break.”

 

“We’ll have to go in from above,” Dredd said, tracing his gauntleted finger down the length of the vent on the screen. 

 

“Well, um, yes. So…” Techie shrugged, trying to seem braver than he felt. “I’m ready to climb up another building.”

 

***

 

Anderson’s head was spinning. As much as she tried to cling to consciousness, holding to it with her metaphorical fingernails, she drifted in and out. The Stitch Maker was talking; two people were hauling her up, their expressions blank and their foreheads marked with blue; then she was on a stretcher being guided through the lab; then she was being strapped to a table in a room that she recognized, although she’d never been there before.

 

Oh, no. She had to get out of here.

 

One of the Stitch Maker’s blanks was securing restraints around her wrists. She tried to move, tried to get away from him, but she could barely twitch her fingers. The blank finished what he was doing and moved away. There was something about the way he’d tied her down. There was something, she had to think about it, she had to… She couldn’t get her mind to work. 

 

“Be careful, don’t hold the grip of her gun,” the Stitch Maker said. “They have protections programmed in. Just set it down.”

 

Anderson lolled her head, watching as her gun was put on a table across the room, out of her reach. She had to… She had to think…

 

Her restraints were sloppily tightened. The weren’t flush to her wrists. That was what she had to notice, that was… She could use that if she could just… If she could move…

 

It was so difficult to think, to remember. Part of her, a dangerous, tempting part, just wanted to close her eyes and sleep and come up with a plan when she felt better. 

 

_No, no, if I don’t_ do _something I’m going to die here!_ She struggled to focus. She knew something about this, she knew what was happening to her.

 

She called up everything she could remember about sedatives. They increased the release of neurotransmitters that prevented brain cells from communicating. That was how they slowed down cognitive function. She thought. Could she trust her memory now? Was she wrong?

 

There was no time to doubt herself. 

 

“Well, let’s get to work, shall we?” the Stitch Maker said, her voice almost but not quite cheerful, not managing to muster enough emotion to cover the dead flatness of her expression. “I’ve called the cavalry, so I’ll just have to trust my Judges to take care of your partner. That leaves me with you. I’m looking forward to this.”

 

She continued to mutter to herself as she tapped at the control computer, as the machines around Anderson hummed to life. She was talking. She’d talked in the hallway, too. It was what she wanted to do, Anderson realized through the fog of her mind.

 

_Keep her talking._

 

“You’re too…” Anderson’s tongue was thick in her mouth, it was so hard to get the words out. “You’re too young. The records…”

 

The Stitch Maker paused in the process of pulling on her hazmat scrubs. A grin crossed her face, fierce and a bit mad, then vanished. “Oh, yes. There’s been _a_ Stitch Maker around for a while. I met him, oh, nine or ten years ago now. Just woke up to life and he was there.” 

 

The Stitch Maker pulled her mask down over her head and hit a few keys on the computer. A scanner like a metal and plastic halo descended to encircle Anderson’s head.

 

Anderson ignored it, refused to let it get to her. She had never done anything like what she was attempting. She would need every ounce of her psychic abilities. She had to concentrate as much as possible. 

 

“What…?” she asked, not really paying attention to what she was asking, just hoping to distract the Stitch Maker while she flung herself deep into her own mind. She didn’t bother to try to build an environment, to translate her brain into surroundings she could understand. She wasn’t after her thoughts and memories, she was after the impulses, the chemicals, the cells themselves.

 

The Stitch Maker stopped her work and cocked her head, her voice distorted now through the mask. “Oh, you didn’t think this mark on my head was just for show, did you? No, no, I’m a blank, too. I was the very first, the original. The only one made by the original Stitch Maker.”

 

Anderson stared at her, blinking slowly, playing up her confusion, her fuzzy-headedness. She opened her mouth to speak, hoping the Stitch Maker would want to cut her off, keep talking. All the while, she felt out the connections between her own brain cells, forcing the sedative and neurotransmitters to the margins, forcing open the channels of communication between cells. 

 

“He told me that I had asked him,” the Stitch Maker was saying. “That I’d payed him. To wipe all my memories. He could have been lying, of course, but if he wasn’t… I have no idea what I was running from that made that seem like a good idea. Because as soon as I woke up, completely alone, well, of course he owned me.”

 

_Work, work, work_ , Anderson thought desperately. She had explored her own mind, a little, but it had always been a little disorienting and uncomfortable. She’d never done something like this to anyone. She had no idea what it was doing to her brain, if there would be any lasting effects, but she didn’t have the time to worry about that. She couldn’t die in this terrible lab.

 

“He was an idiot.” The Stitch Maker’s voice was changing, now, tightening and straining with emotion, anger that was audible even from behind the mask. “He had some idea that he was an explorer, an innovator who was discovering the limits of the human body. He only patched people up so that he could get enough money to run his experiments. He didn’t have any idea of the potential of the things he could do. He didn’t even want to make more like me. And you know what the worst part was?”

 

Anderson didn’t answer, just stared, eyes wide, letting her head loll to the side. Her heart was pounding with relief as well as fear, now, because little by little, her thoughts were clearing, moving faster. Her senses were sharpening, she could feel the tips of her fingers and toes. It was working.

 

“The worst part was that, after a while, he started _trusting_ me.” The Stitch Maker’s voice was getting quieter, thrumming with anger so hot it sounded like rage. “He actually thought, after enough time had passed, that I _liked_ him. That I was _loyal_. So what did I do?”

 

The Stitch Maker whirled away from Anderson, leaning over her computer, her body tense. Anderson slowly, carefully started to move her hands and feet, testing the restraints, collecting her thoughts, remembering all the training she’d ever gotten on situations like this. She had managed to clear her head, but it would be worth nothing if she couldn’t get off the table.

 

“As soon as I saw my moment, I killed him. And I took everything that was his, and made it mine. It took a while to train my hands, but hey, there’s plenty of bodies in this city to practice on. There’s plenty of people no one would miss.”

 

Anderson thought of Techie. Had he really had no one who missed him? Anderson couldn’t afford the anger that swept through her; it would only cloud her thoughts. Still, she couldn’t help but ask, thickly, “What do you want?”

 

Luckily, the Stitch Maker was too caught up in her own anger to notice that Anderson’s speech wasn’t quite as muddled as it had been. The Stitch Maker glanced impassively at her and shrugged. “I want to make money. Enough money to keep me well out of anyone else’s reach. That’s all anyone wants, isn’t it?”

 

Anderson didn’t answer. One of her wrist restraints was looser than the other, the left one, but she wouldn’t be able to pull free without the Stitch Maker and her blanks noticing what she was doing. 

 

An enormous _crash_ echoed from close by, bouncing off the walls so that Anderson couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from. The Stitch Maker jumped away from her computer with a curse, and the two blanks darted toward the door of the lab. 

 

“You, with me,” the Stitch Maker said, pointing to one of the blanks. “You, stay here and guard the Judge.”

 

All Anderson needed was one moment. The Stitch Maker and her accompanying blank left the room and, for an instant, Anderson’s guard looked after them, facing away from the table. 

 

Anderson forced her brain and her body into motion and yanked her left hand as hard as she could through the restraint. She felt the pain and pushed past it, refusing to let it slow her momentum. A squelch of her skin breaking, pops as her finger and hand bones were crunched together, and she jerked her raw, bloody hand free, turning toward the other wrist and scrabbling at the buckle. 

 

She heard a sharp intake of breath from the blank as he saw what she was doing, but she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t slow down.

 

She wrenched the buckle open, her fingernails cracking against the metal, and threw herself off the table just as the blank slammed his body against it. She stumbled across the room, stretching her hand toward her gun.

 

The blank’s hand closed around her arm. Her hand closed around the grip of her gun. 

 

She let her instincts take over, whipping the gun around and firing. At such close range, even without taking aim and with her mind still clouded, she could hardly miss. 

 

The blank fell dead, a pool of dark blood spreading from him. Anderson could only spare him a glance. She wished she hadn’t had to kill him, wished she’d been able to save him from the Stitch Maker. She wished she knew whether it was him or the other blank who had buckled the restraint onto her left wrist, whether whoever it was had done it on purpose. But there was no time. 

 

She took a breath, focusing on making sure her mind was as clear as she could make it, and moved to the door of the lab.  

 

***

 

Dredd had barely taken the time to secure a carbon-fiber line to the roof of the building before he was dropping down into the vent, wedging his knees and back on either side of the shaft to slow his descent and catch himself if he fell. 

 

Or, more likely, catch himself if Techie fell onto him. Dredd had to divide his attention between what was below him and the man above him. He wouldn’t have guessed that Techie would be able to grip the line all the way down, but he was apparently stronger than he looked. Or more determined. Or more desperate.

 

The vent shaft was dusty and dark and suffused with a faint smell of blood and tissue that Dredd was sure had to be many times worse in the lab areas themselves. It made Dredd’s skin crawl. He strained his eyes to see what was below him, and grimaced as he saw a flat pane of metal resolve itself out of the darkness. 

 

“I see the vent,” Dredd said, and then, hastily, “Don’t look down, just focus on climbing. We’ll be there soon.”

 

Dredd let himself slide slightly down the cord, carefully letting the cord flow through his gloved hands until his feet hit the solid metal gate covering the vent. When Techie came within arm’s reach, he steadied the other man as he put his feet down and regained his balance.

 

“Alright,” Dredd said. “Ready?”

 

Techie nodded and felt along the edge of the gate until he found an access panel and pulled it open. Inside was a mess of outlets and wires and circuit boards and electronic parts. Dredd squinted at it. “Can you even see what you’re doing?” He gestured toward the pinpoint of light high above them. 

 

Techie tilted his head to one side and stared at Dredd. Dredd couldn’t be sure in such low light, but he thought Techie was giving him an unimpressed look. The other man’s mechanical eyes whirred, pupils presumably opening wide. 

 

“Understood,” Dredd said, a bit ruefully. “Just get to work.”

 

Dredd stood over him in silence, watching Techie move wires around, plug things in, tap the keys on his tablet. 

 

“I, hold on, I think…” Techie muttered to himself. “Yes! Oh, wait, shit.”

 

Dredd saw the problem at the same time Techie did. The gate clanked, thunked, and then started to move, swinging open from the center outward. Under the heavy metal was a much weaker grate that would certainly not support their weight. 

 

Dredd grabbed hold of the cord and pulled his feet up, then grabbed Techie’s arm, hauling him up and keeping him from falling through. He stared through the grate at what was below them: an empty room with three metal beds, shelves on the walls full of surgical equipment, and a drain in the center of a concrete floor liberally stained with old, rust-colored splatters. 

 

“Oh, huh,” Techie said. “Thanks for that.”

 

“No problem. Can you hold on to the cord?”

 

“Yeah, why? What are you going to do?” 

 

Dredd didn’t answer, just made sure that Techie’s hands were locked securely around the cord, carefully gauged the distance to the ground, and let go. He fell through the grate with his legs straight and pointed, then bent his knees as he hit the ground, turned the impact into a roll, and came back to his feet. 

 

“Whoa,” Techie said from the vent above him.

 

“Jump,” Dredd said.

 

Dredd caught Techie, dodged the man’s long flailing limbs, and set him down on his feet on the floor. 

 

“What now?” Techie asked. 

 

The sound of footsteps answered Techie’s question for him. Dredd shoved Techie behind him and drew his gun. 

 

The door to the room banged open, and Dredd leaped forward. “Down on the ground!” he shouted back to Techie, just in case there was a gun in play. 

 

The first person through the door had a blue mark on his forehead. “Stun,” Dredd said clearly beside the barrel of his gun, and fired, aiming a little to one side of the heart. 

 

The blank dropped like a stone. At almost the same moment, Dredd heard another gun shot, somewhere distant in the lab. His heart lurched, wondering if Anderson had been the firer or the target of that bullet, but there was no time to worry about it. In the hallway behind him, Dredd caught sight of a woman that struck him as familiar. 

 

Dredd raised his gun and fired at her, but the Stitch Maker moved quickly behind a bend in the hall, and the stun bullet bounced harmlessly off the wall.

 

“Standard bullets,” Dredd said to his gun, grimly, as he moved to follow the Stitch Maker. He wouldn’t take any chances.

 

“Who was that?” Techie asked, getting himself up off the floor.

 

“That was the Stitch Maker,” Dredd said flatly, and before Techie could say anything else, “Come on. We have to find Anderson.”

 

Almost as soon as he’d said it, they heard a shout from the direction in which the Stitch Maker had vanished. Dredd and Techie rushed around the corner and discovered Judge Anderson and the Stitch Maker on the ground, grappling for Anderson’s gun.

 

Dredd whipped the muzzle of his gun toward the ceiling and fired, the sound a painful blast in the confined space. The Stitch Maker flinched at the sound, but Anderson, her Judge’s training showing through even without her helmet protecting her ears, kept her attention on the fight and wrenched her gun out of the Stitch Maker’s hands. Before she could level it on her opponent, though, the Stitch Maker kicked out at her and shoved her away, scrambling to her feet against the wall.

 

“Don’t,” Dredd said, pointing his gun at the Stitch Maker as she darted her eyes up the hallway, obviously planning to run again.

 

Anderson came to her feet, pointing her own gun at the Stitch Maker, as well. Dredd could see that her face was pale and her eyes wide and dilated. She looked unsteady on her feet, and her left hand was bloody and dripping onto the floor.

 

“Are you alright, Judge Anderson?” he asked.

 

“I’ve been drugged,” she said. “A sedative.”

 

“How are you standing?” Dredd asked. He didn’t imagine the Stitch Maker would be one to mess up a dose.

 

Anderson smiled, a little wanly, and touched her bleeding hand, the one not holding her gun, to her temple. “Psychic,” she said. 

 

Dredd nodded approvingly and turned back to the Stitch Maker. Anderson was waiting on him to pronounce the sentence. 

 

“Attempted murder of a Judge,” Dredd ground out, finding it unexpectedly difficult to control his anger as he thought about what might have happened. “The sentence is death, but if you agree to cooperate in handing over your records of payments to Judges, it may be commuted to imprisonment.”

 

The Stitch Maker tilted her head to one side, narrowing her eyes. “Down this hallway, to the right, second door on the left. That’s my computer room. It’s where you’ll find that information, and descriptions of my procedures. Client lists. All of that.”

 

Dredd couldn’t help but notice the way she was speaking slowly, deliberately. Trying to waste their time, make it more likely that her own Judges would show up. He tightened his grip on the gun, finger inching for the trigger.

 

Before he could say anything, Anderson asked, “And the records of where the people you turned into blanks came from?”

 

The Stitch Maker grinned suddenly, looking past Dredd at Techie, who was hunched nervously behind the Judges.

 

“Poor thing,” she said, her voice low and venomous. “You know what?” Out of the corner of his eye, Dredd could see Techie leaning forward, eyes wide and intent on the Stitch Maker as she spoke. The Stitch Maker was leaning forward slightly, too. “I didn’t keep any of that. Because it didn’t matter.”

 

Her grin growing wider, the Stitch Maker suddenly jumped forward, bringing one arm up. Dredd caught sight of the glint of metal in her hand, apparently at the same moment that Anderson did, because they both fired at almost the same time. 

 

The Stitch Maker fell to the ground, two ragged holes in her head. Dredd stepped closer and nudged her hand with his boot to see what she had been holding. It was a small knife that had been tied to her wrist, under her clothes.

 

Dredd felt the same unreasonable, inexplicable, sinister feeling he had gotten when he’d killed Ma-Ma in Peach Trees: disappointment. He felt as if the Stitch Maker had let him down. In the end she had underestimated them, hadn’t been prepared for them, had chosen a last spiteful word and pointless defiance. She had been less than she had seemed, while they were tracking her down.

 

Being a Judge was about the victory over crime, the end result, the protection of the innocent. It wasn’t supposed to be about the chase, the fight, the battle. Sometimes, though…

 

Dredd forced the disappointment down, and refused to think about it further.

 

***

 

Techie couldn’t keep himself from staring down at the Stitch Maker, trying to see something, some emotion, anything in her face. He didn’t know why he bothered. She had been a monster who had done nothing but hurt him. And yet he still felt a pang of sadness as he looked down at her.

 

He’d only had a moment to hope, a split second to think maybe it would be that easy, just opening a file on a computer and finding out who he’d been. It shouldn’t have been enough time to get used to the idea, but it still hurt to lose.

 

To lose the version of him that was dead now. The version of him that she had erased.

 

He struggled not to lean against Anderson, knowing she wasn’t at her best, either, but his legs were trembling. He just wanted to sleep.

 

“We need to go,” Dredd said, his voice softer than Techie was used to. Anderson nodded and gestured Techie ahead of her, so that he had a Judge both in front of and behind him as they navigated their way through the hallways of the Stitch Maker’s building.

 

They were silent as they found their way past the blast door, the stairs in front of them seeming like the way out of hell.

 

They were halfway up the stairs when Dredd stopped short, reaching an arm out to keep Anderson and Techie from climbing any further. 

 

“What…” Anderson started, but Dredd shook his head sharply. They stood and listened.

 

A moment later, Techie heard it, too. 

 

There were footsteps above, and lowered voices. A lot of people, wearing boots, and talking to each other steadily. The clunk of armor, the cocking of weapons. They were deploying.

 

“Judges,” Dredd whispered.

 

“Ours or hers?” Anderson whispered back.

 

“No contact,” Dredd said, touched his helmet where his earpiece was. “Hers.”

 

Anderson moved her head and they inched their way back down the stairs, keeping their steps light. Techie’s heart banged against his ribs. He thought he knew the Judges’ plan: get back past the blast door, close it behind them, and get out by the vent he and Dredd had come in through.

 

But they were exhausted, and it would be difficult to get out that way. And even if they did, the bad Judges had probably surrounded the building.

 

Anderson and Dredd were both in front of him now, moving carefully with their guns up and their bodies angled to shield him. Ridiculously, it made him feel warm and protected, even though he knew they couldn’t keep him safe.

 

The voices above were moving closer. They couldn’t move any faster without making enough noise to draw attention. _I’m going to die_ , Techie thought, far more calm than he had any right to be.

 

A sudden, tremendous muddle of noise came from the floor above, and Techie was so startled he nearly fell down the stairs. Anderson and Dredd froze, tense. 

 

People were shouting. Guns were being fired. “Go,” Dredd said, “go, get behind the blast door.” They stumbled down the stairs and over the lip of the blast door, crouching behind it. Anderson knelt beside the control panel, ready to close it behind them. 

 

The welter of sound was replaced by silence, just as sudden as the noise had been. Techie clenched his fists as they hung suspended in uncertainty.

 

A woman’s voice shouted down the stairs, “Stitch Maker! This is the Chief Judge! We’ve eliminated your paid Judges. Release Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson and surrender.”

 

Anderson huffed a relieved laugh, and even Dredd audibly sighed.

 

“Just in time, Chief,” Dredd called back, and Techie flopped backward onto the floor, almost lightheaded. 

 

_I’m going to live after all_ , he thought, and giggled.

 

***

 

“So, will I live?” Anderson asked, smiling in a way that she was sure must look a bit tired and wan. She wished she could just lay down on the exam table and fall asleep. 

 

Dr. Akinyemi did not seem amused as she bandaged up Anderson’s bruised, shredded hand. “Well, you managed to drag yourself back here with all your limbs, at least. You and Dredd, not to mention that kid you pulled off the street, got yourselves banged up pretty impressively, though. I think I’m just going to print out a list of your sprains instead of list them all. And I’m referring you for some brain scans. If you don’t make an appointment I’ll give you hell.”

 

“My brain feels fine.”

 

Dr. Akinyemi gave her a decidedly unimpressed look. “You don’t know that. It’s not like the medical community has a lot of psychics to study. There’s no precedent for what you did. You’ll have the brain scans.” 

 

Her tone brooked absolutely no argument. Anderson just nodded.

 

Dr. Akinyemi’s glare softened. “I’m glad you made it back. You and Dredd both. And Techie.”

 

“Will you look him over, too?” Anderson asked. 

 

Dr. Akinyemi snorted. “You’re damned right I will. As soon as I’m done with you. Try and stop me. Let me just give you one last stick for the pain.”

 

Dr. Akinyemi turned from her table with a needle in her hand, and Anderson tensed. She had been fine when Dr. Akinyemi had given her all the muscle repair booster injections, but somehow this needle had caught her by surprise. For a split second, she was back in that hallway with the Stitch Maker leaning over her, ready to slow her mind and make her helpless.

 

“Are you alright?” Dr. Akinyemi asked, her face an open picture of concern. Anderson was safe, she was in the Hall of Justice, she was fine. 

 

She took a deep breath and nodded. “Yeah, everything’s fine.”

 

“I don’t have to give you this injection,” Dr. Akinyemi said. “It’ll provide more lasting help with the pain, but it’s entirely up to you.”

 

“I’m fine,” Anderson said. Her heart rate was already returning to normal, the adrenaline spike leaving her feeling wrung out and a little embarrassed at her reaction. “I’d like the pain meds, please.”

 

Dr. Akinyemi was slow and deliberate in her approach, and Anderson was torn between gratitude and irritation that it was necessary at all. The injection went fine, because of course it did. “There. You’re all done,” Dr. Akinyemi said. “There’s nothing unexpected about a response like that, you know.”

 

“Thanks,” Anderson said, standing up from the table with effort. Even with the pain meds and muscle repair boosters, she felt like every one of her joints was throbbing. And she was _so_ tired.

 

“Anytime, Judge. Go ahead and send in my next patient on your way out.”

 

Techie was in the small waiting room in front of Dr. Akinyemi’s clinic, still wrapped in Dredd’s coat, his feet in their borrowed boots resting on the edge of his chair, his arms around his legs, and his face resting against his knees. Anderson thought he was almost asleep, but he stirred when she touched his shoulder. 

 

“Hmmwhat?” he asked, blinking up at her groggily. 

 

“You’re up. Dr. Akinyemi wants to see you. Do you want me to come with you?”

 

Techie thought about that for a second, then shook his head. “No. I can do it. Thank you, though.”

 

“No problem,” she said, smiling as she helped him to his feet. “Listen, Techie, um… I need to go talk to the Chief Judge and Dredd, but, I want to talk to you again, before you leave. So, could you wait here, if I’m not back by the time you’re done? Please?”

 

Techie looked nervous at the request, but he nodded. “Sure. Sure thing.”

 

Anderson rested her hand on his shoulder for a moment, then walked past him, out into the hall. 

 

She found both Dredd and the Chief Judge in the hall outside the Chief Judge’s office, talking in low voices. Dredd still had his helmet on. Anderson wasn’t surprised at that, anymore.

 

The Chief Judge looked up as she approached. Something was wrong, Anderson realized. The Chief Judge’s face was like stone, and Dredd’s shoulders were slumped, just slightly.

 

“Judge,” the Chief Judge said, nodding to Anderson.

 

“Ma’am,” Anderson responded. “What’s going on?”

 

“We’ve started cataloging the information on the Stitch Maker’s computer,” the Chief Judge answered. “There’s a lot to go through, but we prioritized finding the names of Judges that the Stitch Maker was paying, or that she knew could be bought. We have a list.”

 

“There were more than the ones at the lab?” Anderson asked, her heart speeding up. There had been sixteen bodies in and around the Stitch Maker’s building; she had hoped that was the end of it.

 

The Chief Judge nodded wearily. “So far, we have 124 names.”

 

Anderson felt a queasy sinking in her chest and stomach. Her mind felt like it was full of static.

 

_You were supposed to be helping people_ , she thought. Even after everything she’d endured, everything she’d watched other people suffer, she couldn’t help the disappointment, like she was a child learning for the first time that the world wasn’t good.

 

Dredd was very still beside her. Anderson glanced at him. His face, what was visible with the helmet, was not set in an implacable scowl. It was terribly blank. 

 

“This is going to take some time to root out,” the Chief Judge said, sighing. “And it’s going to leave us even more short-handed than normal, probably for years. It’s going to be tough to recover from. But we have the chance to fix this, to recover from it, thanks to you both.” The Chief Judge nodded again, then turned on her heel and retreated into her office, her back straight and her hands clenched into fists at her sides, shutting the door behind her.

 

Dredd’s gauntleted hands suddenly moved toward his helmet. Anderson realized what he was doing just in time and turned her back to him, facing back down the hallway and instinctively raising her hands, as if she was a guard protecting her comrade. 

 

She could still hear Dredd, though. She heard the clatter of armor, of a helmet being removed, then a thump that she thought, based on the motions she could just see out of the corner of her eye, was Dredd resting his head against the wall with a bit too much force. She resisted the urge to look, to take that secret from him. She wished she could ignore the ragged sound of Dredd’s breathing, the only audible sign of how that list had hurt him. 

 

She waited, and didn’t look, and let him have a moment to be wounded.

 

Finally, there was movement at the corner of her vision, the sound of a helmet clinking into place against a Judge’s shoulder armor. When Anderson turned back around, Dredd was helmeted, straight-backed and scowling as he always was.

 

“The Chief Judge has revoked the standing and access of everyone on that list of traitors, and released the list to all active Judges,” Dredd growled, as if nothing had happened. “The Hall of Justice is on high alert. Six have already been captured, the rest have probably gone to ground. We’ll catch them.”

 

Anderson nodded. “I’m glad. I… I had something else I wanted to talk to the Chief Judge about. Do you think she’ll see me now, or should I come back later?”

 

“Your request,” Dredd asked, and Anderson felt a jump of nerves. “She asked me for my opinion. I wanted to talk to you about it.”

 

Anderson felt a complicated swirl of fear, indignation, and a sad thread of disappointment. She had thought, after everything, that… “I understand you probably have some concerns, Judge,” she said stiffly, trying to keep her emotions in check. “Given my performance in Peach Trees. I know you passed me in the hopes that I’d overcome my weaknesses once I was a Judge…”

 

Dredd shook his head with a sharp, sudden motion, and she cut herself off. “No,” he said. “That’s not why I passed you.”

 

“Then why?” Anderson asked, a little desperately. The question had weighed on her mind. 

 

Dredd was silent for so long that she was worried he wasn’t going to answer. She didn’t want to leave without finally understanding. At last, he sighed and said, “I thought I knew the right way to be a Judge. The only way. I thought we all had to be unbending. But the Judges in Peach Trees, the Judges on the list, they didn’t bend. They just broke. You bent, when you let Techie go. And it was the right thing to do. You saw that when I didn’t. You can see that there is more in the world than just criminal or not. I passed you because I thought… I thought maybe it would be better, if not every Judge was like me.”

 

Anderson didn’t have anything to say in response to that. She was stunned. Dredd just stared impassively back at her, visor reflecting the hallway lights overhead, eyes invisible. 

 

“I… I see,” she managed to stutter out. 

 

“The Chief Judge approved your proposal,” Dredd said. “On my recommendation. Please let Techie know.”

 

“I will, Judge Dredd,” Anderson said, and smiled at him, She turned around and headed back toward the elevator before she could see if he had any visible reaction.

 

As she rode the elevator back down to Dr. Akinyemi’s clinic, she pulled out her tablet and started composing a message. To hell with the old guard of the Judges and what they thought. She belonged as a Judge.

 

_To: Office of Dr. Felix Zapatero, Post-Trauma Specialist_

_From: Judge Cassandra Anderson_

_I would like to make an appointment…_

 

***

 

It was still nerve-wracking to be in a clinic, but Techie found himself much less afraid than the last time. The Stitch Maker, the doctor he’d been most afraid of, was dead, and Techie felt braver after all of that than he’d ever felt in his life.

 

“Well, you’re alright,” Dr. Akinyemi said. “Some scrapes, which I think you should watch carefully given your lowered immune system, but you’re in better shape than the Judges, at least.”

 

“Thank you, Doctor,” Techie said politely. 

 

Dr. Akinyami frowned at him. “You were in bad shape when Judge Anderson first brought you in. I hope you won’t mind my asking, but what are you going to do now? Do you have somewhere to go, other than back to the street?”

 

Techie looked away, uncomfortable. “Um… I don’t know yet. Maybe…” He trailed off. He could’t even think of a lie. He had no idea what he was going to do.

 

“I’ll talk to… someone,” Dr. Akinyemi said. “I don’t want you to walk out of here without having somewhere to go.”

 

“Well, I can’t leave yet, anyway,” Techie said. “Judge Anderson wanted to talk to me.”

 

“Oh,” Dr. Akinyemi said, sounding relieved. “Good.”

 

Judge Anderson, as it turned out, was sitting in the waiting room when Techie left the exam room, sprawling tiredly in her chair and staring seriously at the wall. She looked like she was thinking hard about something.

 

“Um…” Techie said, drawing out the sound. Anderson blinked and swung her head around to look at him. “You wanted to talk to me?”

 

Anderson smiled. “Yeah, so… I asked the Chief Judge about you.”

 

“Me?” Techie said in alarm.

 

“Yeah, nothing bad, just… You know, Dr. Akinyemi isn’t a Judge. She’s a doctor that the Hall of Justice contracted with to provide medical care.”

 

“Oh,” Techie said.

 

“Well, we got a lot of data from the Stitch Maker’s computers, and we haven’t even finished going through Ma-Ma’s. Dredd and I have to go back to our regular duties, so we won’t have time to deal with it. I suggested we might need to contract with a specialist to sort through it all.”

 

Techie started to feel a thread of hope unwinding in his gut. “Yeah, um… That sounds like a good idea.”

 

Anderson grinned. “I told her you’d be the best person for the job, and Dredd agreed with me.”

 

Oh, hell. Techie couldn’t keep himself from grinning back. He hadn’t thought it was possible to like them even more, but, well, here he was. 

 

“So how about it?” Anderson asked. “Do you want a job? The Hall of Justice will set you up with an apartment in one of the blocks we rent from, a salary, medical care, the whole deal.”

 

“Do you think…” Techie cleared his throat awkwardly. “Do you think you’ll still need my help with things? You and Dredd, I mean? Like, um… Will I see you guys?”

 

Anderson put her hand on his shoulder. “Yeah. I think you’ll see us.”

 

“Oh, good,” Techie said. He put his hand on Anderson’s. “So, yeah, I… I’d really like to take the job.”

 

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, it came home to him that it was real, the offer was real. He had a future. The relief was so intense that for a second he thought he would cry. 

 

“I’m glad,” Anderson said. “There’s one other thing I wanted to ask you.”

 

“What is it?” Techie said, voice only coming out a little shaky. 

 

“I had the thought that we could put out your picture, as a missing person. Transmit it across the city and see if anyone recognizes you. Maybe… maybe you could find your family.”

 

Techie froze. It was such an overwhelming thought… “Can I think about it?” he asked.

 

“Of course,” Anderson said. “Take as much time as you need. If you want to do it, just come find me and tell me. We’ll be in the same building, after all.”

 

_We’ll be in the same building_. Techie wasn’t going to be alone.

 

He sighed, happier than he could remember being… well, ever.


End file.
